AMD Could Profit from Buffer-Overflow Protection

spin2cool writes "New Scientist has an article about how AMD and Intel are planning on releasing new consumer chips with built-in buffer-overflow protection. Apparently AMD's chips will make it to market first, though, which some analysts think could give AMD an advantage as the next round of chips are released. The question will be whether their PR department can spin this into a big enough story to sell to the Average Joe."

Comments

Re:Ahem...

[ignipotentis]

Its not a broken VM architecture. Intel chose to go with out a split cache for the x86 becuase of speed. The logic is less complicated and they could ramp up the speed of the processeors quicker.

I know, silly intel for believeing that programers could check their own bounds. It is however, a necessary thing when you have single cache. Now that the instruction and data caches are going to be seperate, its not as crucial.

Nothing is allowed to be executed from the data cache, so if you overflow a buffer, and throw code into the data cache, no big deal.

Thats the idea. It sets a flag and says, hey... this code isn't in the instruction cache, you shouldn't execute it. It is up to the OS in most cases to go "wow, thanks for catching that..." and close the application without delay.

We will still be at the hands of microsoft to correctly implement this final task. I'm sure BSD and Linux will implement this stage just fine, but i'm not at all confident that MS will do what basically amounts to an instruction check (all in all, not much different from a bounds check) correctly.

Re:There's no excuse for buffer overflows

[stratjakt]

Remember back in the 60s and before

No, I dont.

Now tell us how you used to walk 20 miles to school in the snow, uphill both ways, gramps.