Re: Palladium in Athlon64/Opteron ???
On Sat, Nov 08, 2003 at 12:00:27PM +0100, Robert Derochette wrote:
| I've read an article
| (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/33729.html). I'm not sure I've
| understood it correctly. Does that mean Linux or any non-Micro$oft OS
| couldn't be run anymore on that CPU unless we disable this "feature" ? I
| was considering buying an athlon64 for my next PC, I think I'll keep my
| a-bit-older-but-still-good athlon 900mhz :-).
Bearing in mind that Linux already runs on AMD64, I don't think that
you've got too much to worry about, at least for the while. The
description on The Register site sounds more like marking pages as
non-executable, which was something I thought had been present since the
286 or 386; there are patches for Linux (grsecurity, exec-shield) which
use this type of CPU feature to increase security against buffer overflows
and the like. (There was some recent flamage on debian-devel about
packaging these patches in Debian.)
On the other hand, I may be completely misreading the article, or The
Reg may simply be up to their usual journalistic scare-mongering.
Cameron.
Reply to: