It's Time To Say Farewell To MPX In The Linux Kernel

We knew MPX support was on its way out of the kernel especially after GCC dropped its compiler-side support for it. It looks now like the Memory Protection Extensions support will be removed from Linux 4.21.

Dave Hansen issued a pull request today for removing the Intel MPX support from the Linux kernel by way of the x86 staging tree.

The Memory Protection Extensions support is being dropped from the mainline kernel, as the PR states, "the benefits of keeping the feature in the tree are not worth the ongoing maintenance cost."

MPX support was introduced with Skylake processors and designed to offer better security by providing checks for pointer references at run-time to prevent possible buffer overflows. But its adoption didn't take off too greatly and since then software-based solutions have become more powerful and speedy with projects like AddressSanitizer.

So assuming the "mpx-remove" patch is pulled soon to the x86 tree, it will be removed from the mainline kernel with the upcoming Linux 4.21 cycle.