Nearly one year ago Intel published the X86S specification (formerly stylized as 'X86-S') for simplifying the Intel architecture by removing support for 16-bit and 32-bit operating systems
AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) are intended to help provide better security for virtual machines and are key elements to both companies investments around confidential computing
Seeking an acceptable unaccepted memory policy [LWN net] lwn.net - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from lwn.net Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
A 64-bit pointer can address a lot of memory far more than just about any
application could ever need. As a result, there are bits within that pointer that
are not really needed to address memory, and which might be put to other
needs. Storing a few bits of metadata within a pointer is a common enough
use case that multiple architectures are adding support for it at the
hardware level. Intel is no exception; support for its "Linear Address
Masking" (LAM) feature has been slowly making its way toward the mainline
kernel.
Memory management generally works at the level of pages, which typically
contain 4,096 bytes but may be larger. The kernel, though, has extended
the concept of pages to include compound pages, which are groups of
contiguous single pages. That, in turn, has made the definition of
what a "page" is a bit fuzzy. Matthew Wilcox has been working since last
year on a concept called "page folios" which is meant to bring the picture
back into focus; whether the memory-management community will accept it
remains unclear, though.