Report on the bounded pointers work

[Jeff Law]

On 11/05/13 03:35, Florian Weimer wrote:
> On 11/04/2013 05:43 PM, Joseph S. Myers wrote:
>> On Mon, 4 Nov 2013, Jeff Law wrote:
>>
>>> You might also be referring to Greg McGary's work on bounded
>>> pointers, I don't
>>> think that ever got integrated or if it did, it got pulled long ago.
>>
>> It was integrated in 2000, removed in 2002/2003 (I removed the relics
>> from
>> glibc earlier this year).  By using fat pointers, it required the entire
>> program including all libraries it used to be built with bounded pointers
>> enabled (and associated changes to all assembly sources to handle them).
>
> Yes, I was referring to Greg's work.  I'm wondering if the trade-offs
> have changed since then, considering that it's again en vogue to
> bootstrap new architectures.  It's difficult to tell without more
> details about that past effort, though.
Not really, IMHO.  If anything as software complexity continues to 
increase (specifically pulling in more and more libraries from various 
sources), the problem of mixing instrumented and uninstrumented code has 
actually gotten worse.

jeff