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posted by
cmn32480
on Wednesday May 23 2018, @06:47PM
from the your-computer-is-not-a-fast-PDP-11 dept.
from the your-computer-is-not-a-fast-PDP-11 dept.
Very interesting article at the IEEE ACM by David Chisnall.
In the wake of the recent Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, it's worth spending some time looking at root causes. Both of these vulnerabilities involved processors speculatively executing instructions past some kind of access check and allowing the attacker to observe the results via a side channel. The features that led to these vulnerabilities, along with several others, were added to let C programmers continue to believe they were programming in a low-level language, when this hasn't been the case for decades.
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(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday May 24 2018, @06:04PM
Pointers with a bit extra around the waist :D So yeah it's just a general term for having more than an address. It could be range resulting in a bounded pointer... It could be ownership resulting in a capability pointer... It could have meta bits signifying explicit data type... Typically it's a mix of the above.
The Mill patents in question covers their variation (turfs), roughly how it's implemented at the CPU and MMU levels and how they've circumvented the problems the article raises as reason to abandon the C memory model.
compiling...