Linux 4.6 Will Try To Make It Easier To Find Assembly Code Bugs

Linus Torvalds has honored the request to land the "objtool" stack frame validation support for the Linux 4.6 kernel.

This new Objtool effort provides build-time object file validation for kernel stack frame correctness. This new objtool user-space utility is run at the kernel's build time to analyze the resulting .o machine code, decode the instruction stream, and checks the interpreted instructions. Suspicious Assembly code patterns are then output with currently this objtool just checking frame pointer usage but other features are planned. Another early limitation is that so far, only x86_64 is supported.

Those wishing to learn more about this new objtool addition to the Linux 4.6 kernel can read more information via this Git commit.