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.

PKU Memory Protection Keys are going to be a feature of future Intel CPUs as explained in the aforelinked article and with them come new PDPKRU and WRPKRU instructions. With this commit today to the mainline GNU Compiler Collection, it appears GCC has now support for these new PKU instructions.

Memory Protection Keys also require support from the kernel side, which have yet to be merged, but hopefully this new memory protection feature will be readied in time for the feature appearing in forthcoming Intel hardware.

For exposing the support in GCC is the -mpku switch.