Tyler Oderkirk's Blog

Here’s a really impressive method to provide memory safety for your favorite kernel that so desperately lacks it: the “Secure Virtual Architecture”. See…

• This 24MB 21min Quicktime video…
• and the accompanying PDF slides…
• and the research paper itself – Secure Virtual Architecture: A Safe Execution Environment for Commodity Operating Systems. See especially page 5 for the SAFECode features it provides.

I’m curious what the Japanese mobile operator NTT DoCoMo is using it for, if anything. One of their employees was a co-author.

See also:

• May ‘07 LLVM Developers’ Meeting Proceedings for more LLVM Developer’s Meeting proceedings
• LudoA’s thread about compiling popular FLOSS kernels with LLVM. Sounds like clang can handle FreeBSD.

Update: These researchers presented in 2008 as well.

Further reading

• Google’s attempts at running Valgrind’s MemCheck tool on User-mode Linux. John Reiser did most of the work on the project. See his initial announcement and complete write-up for more info. John has released some other slick software through BitWagon Software LLC including an ARM-tuned zlib port, some GPL’d dynamic linker hacks, and a super-slick (commercially-licensed) dynamic profiler.