RISC-V Changes For Linux 6.13 Deliver Pointer Masking In User-Space
Most notable for RISC-V this cycle is bringing user-space pointer masking support. RISC-V user-space pointer masking is for memory tagging like Arm's Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) and Intel Linear Address Masking (LAM). The pointer masking makes use of ignored bits of the effective address on RISC-V platforms and can help with memory safety for user-space applications. This RISC-V pointer masking relies on the Smnpm or Ssnpm extensions. This pointer masking support though is disabled by default with user-space must needing to manually enable it. More details in the prior Phoronix article on the topic.
RISC-V for Linux 6.13 also brings support for probing vector misaligned access performance and support for qspinlock on RISC-V systems with Zacas and Zabha support.
More details on the RISC-V updates for Linux 6.13 via this pull request.
1 Comment
