Intel PKU Instruction Support Lands In GCC

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel PKU Instruction Support Lands In GCC

Just a few days ago I was writing about LLVM working on PKU memory protection keys. It seems now GCC has support for Intel's PKU instructions...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GCC-PKU-Instructions

[wizard69]

Which hardware is this expected to land in? Further what makes this instruction so useful in the context of all the other memory protection features in a modern processor.

[Ancurio]

Which hardware is this expected to land in? Further what makes this instruction so useful in the context of all the other memory protection features in a modern processor.

Apparently it's supposed to be a lot cheaper than mprotect. Also, this would be thread-local (as it's a CPU register), as opposed to global mprotect.