Big-endian Gcc on Intel IA32

[Linus Torvalds]

On Mon, 17 Dec 2001, Richard Henderson wrote:
>
> Dunno how far you'd be able to go with this, given the rabid
> casting to unsigned long that tends to happen in the kernel...

To be really effective, you'd really say that you _cannot_ cast a tainted
pointer (or even access through it), except with a specific "untaint me"
operation. The only thing you could do is pass it along to somebody else
who accepted a tainted pointer.

So I wasn't talking about a "const" like bit (even though it shares some
of the notions with "const"), but more of an "immutable" bit.

And I suspect some people might want to use it not as a "taint" bit, but
simply as a way to have a mechanism to strengthen the C type system.

		Linus