Re: [announce] [patch] NX (No eXecute) support for x86, 2.6.7-rc2-bk2

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Wed Jun 02 2004 - 16:15:55 EST




On Wed, 2 Jun 2004, Ingo Molnar wrote:
>
> If the NX feature is supported by the CPU then the patched kernel turns
> on NX and it will enforce userspace executability constraints such as a
> no-exec stack and no-exec mmap and data areas. This means less chance
> for stack overflows and buffer-overflows to cause exploits.

Just out of interest - how many legacy apps are broken by this? I assume
it's a non-zero number, but wouldn't mind to be happily surprised.

And do we have some way of on a per-process basis say "avoid NX because
this old version of Oracle/flash/whatever-binary-thing doesn't run with
it"?

Linus
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