How to talk to your parents about hardware memory safety (CHERI)

Re:How to talk to your parents about hardware memory safety ... by chc4 on Thursday August 08, 2024 @10:14AM (#41191772)

Intel MPX had both hardware support for "bounds tables" and bounds checks[0], along with a "memory key" system[1] more similar to CHERI for memory tagging (only at page granularity, however). Both were massive failures and they are no longer supporting the extensions on new chips going forward.

0: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.5/x86/intel_mpx.html 1: https://lwn.net/Articles/643797/

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Re:How to talk to your parents about hardware memory safety ... by pjmlp on Thursday August 08, 2024 @01:15PM (#41193903)

Meanwhile Solaris Sparc is doing it since 2015, we have ongoing ARM MTE, Apple's PAC, and Microsoft with CherIoT and Pluton.

Yet another example of Intel's failure to deliver.

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Re:How to talk to your parents about hardware memory safety ... by aseipp on Friday August 09, 2024 @09:52AM (#41201853)

MPX is dead, but memory protection keys are a distinct feature and work fine (with some limitations); I haven't seen anything about them being removed at all and Intel doesn't note them in their deprecated features list. AMD even added support for them in Zen3.

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Re:How to talk to your parents about hardware memory safety ... by chc4 on Friday August 09, 2024 @01:15PM (#41203686)

Oh, TIL. I was under the impression they were both removed , and didn't know AMD had it either.

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