Get the latest tech news
Linus Torvalds Adds User-Access Fast Validation Via Address Masking To Linux 6.12
In between Linus Torvalds' busy week being in Vienna for the Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit and related Linux Foundation events as well as managing the Linux 6.12 merge window with landing new features like sched_ext and real-time PREEMPT_RT, he also managed to finish up some of his own code for this next kernel version
This allows architectures to optionally use a data dependent address masking model instead of a conditional branch for validating user accesses. Torvalds explained in more details as part of one of the patches:"The Spectre-v1 mitigations made "access_ok()" much more expensive, since it has to serialize execution with the test for a valid user address. This address masking based user-access fast validation is merged now for Linux 6.12 on x86_64 alongside a lot of other interesting new code to land this week.
Or read this on Phoronix
