Safer Linux Kernel Modules Using the D Programming Language

[Paulo Pinto]

On Wednesday, 11 January 2023 at 09:52:23 UTC, Walter Bright 
wrote:
> By the way, back in the 80's, I wrote my own pointer checker 
> for my own use developing C code. It was immensely useful in 
> flushing bugs out of my code. There are vestiges of it still in 
> the dmd source code.
>
> But it ran very ssssslllllooooooowwwwwwlllllyyyyy, and was not 
> usable for shipped code.
>
> A lot of very capable engineers have working on this problem C 
> has for many decades. If it was solvable, they would have 
> solved it by now.

It is kind of "solved", by turning all computers into C machines,

Solaris under SPARC ADI,

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E53394_01/html/E54815/gqajs.html

Android with MTE,

https://source.android.com/docs/security/test/memory-safety/arm-mte

iOS with XP,

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/preparing_your_app_to_work_with_pointer_authentication

FreeBSD with CHERI,

https://www.cheribsd.org/

Intel messed up their MPX design, but certainly won't want to be 
left behind.

Basically acknowledging that only having bounds and pointer 
checking via hardware memory tagging will fix C derived issues, 
and all mitigations thus far have failed one way or the other.