A new round of changes for 64-bit ARM architecture (ARM64/AArch64) were just loaded into the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window, and its generally some pretty good stuff being included.
The 64-bit ARM space on Linux as been fairly busy, and there’s likely more to come before Linux 4.19 kernel is released.
Some highlights of the 64-bit ARM merges include:
ARM64 support for the new GCC STACKLEAK plug-inthat was merged into gcc-plugins for Linux 4.19. The STACKLEAK compiler plug-in is able to fend off possible flaws/attacks pertaining to uninitialized stack usage, stack content leaking, and stack exhaustion/guard-page skipping. This mainline kernel STACKLEAK was ported from old GrSecurity/PaX code.
Support for the Restartable Sequences system call. This new system call was originally added in Linux 4.18and “RSEQ” allows for faster user-space operations on per-CPU data by providing a shared data structure ABI between each user-space thread and the kernel.
A rewrite of their syscall entry code in C in order to zero out the GPR registers on entry from user-space.
Kexec and Kdump now work on systems started without ACPI support.
Qspinlock to replace their old ticket lock code.
Support for chained PMU counters.
Re-enabled support for huge vmalloc/IO mappings.
Source: https://appuals.com/new-round-of-64-bit-arm-patches-merged-into-linux-4-19-kernel-includes-gcc-stackleak-plugin-support/
Submitted by: Arnfried Walbrecht
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