Intel MPX Support Removed From GCC 9

Written by Michael Larabel in GNU on 8 June 2018 at 06:02 AM EDT. 28 Comments
GNU
Support for Intel Memory Protection Extensions (MPX) is now pretty much dead on Linux.

As a follow-up to the article in April of GCC looking to remove MPX support from their compiler with Intel no longer maintaining that portion of the code and MPX being deprecated already, today the commit went in deleting all of the MPX support in GCC.

It's all gone with the removal today of the MPX support across more than 500 files and 42,014 lines of code being removed.

Linux kernel developers have also been weighing the removal of MPX support from the Linux kernel and now with the GCC support removed, that kernel support will likely be dropped since it's contingent upon a supported compiler.

Intel MPX has been intended to deliver better software security by checking pointer references and more to prevent buffer overflows. MPX support has been present since Intel Skylake CPUs though the adoption hasn't been too great and some favoring AddressSanitizer and other software alternatives for increasing code security.
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