Re: Whizzy New Feature: Paged segmented memory

[jtv]

On Tue, Jan 08, 2002 at 02:05:09PM +0000, Anthony DeRobertis wrote:
> 
> Change gcc. Recompile world. All should work, assuming your gcc changes are 
> bug-free, no one made assumptions about stack layout, no one wrote assembly 
> code, etc. [In other words, after 4 months of debugging you might get X 
> running again...] 
 
And, of course, the same for all other software.  But for a highly secure
project, for instance, that might be worth it.

> Some architectures have hardware assistance for downward growing stacks. One 
> example is 68K. I think x86 does too. OTOH, I don't think PPC does, though I 
> haven't read the Green Book recently. 

68K has predecrement/postincrement addressing modes (I'm not sure that
counts as "forcing" the stack to grow downwards); PPC has a symmetrical
load/store-with-update IIRC.

Jeroen