ChkTag: x86 Memory Safety

Sparse on details.

Presumably will be based on the existing Linear Address Masking/Upper Address Ignore specs, which are equivalent, and will be similar to CHERI.

If so it needs to be opt-in or at least opt-out per process, because many language runtimes use these pointers bits to optimize dynamic types, and would suffer a big performance hit if they were unable to use them.

I hope there are OS level (ie kernel build options) to turn this kind of thing off or just ignore the 'tags'. I know it's important for corporate use cases and monetary transactions and all that, but on my personal computer I use for fun I want to be able to peek and poke.

It’s just probabilistic memory safety, at best

Still cool, but not a replacement for memory safety language implementations.

ChkTag doesn't exist yet, they are working on it

Garbage article.

Like, cool, you guys are starting to talk about a new instruction set that will make C safe somehow. Yet you failed provide an ounce of detail for how you'll accomplish that.

This might as well been a "And we'll make our CPUs 10x faster and they'll use 10x less power!". Or "Future CPUs will have a 10ghz clock speed!"

Again, who is this article for? The government maybe to assure them that x86 will take cyber security seriously?