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by Joel_Mckay 30 days ago
Publicly documented encrypted mmu, as it is the only practical way to isolate contexts on parallel cores.

Or some exotic processor no one would ever sell successfully. =3

2 comments

Intel SGX/TDX and AMD SEV-SNP implemented that (although it was hacked the other day) and some clouds offer it.
What would an encrypted MMU do differently?
Mitigates undetectable bleeding/contamination of information between parallel processes, cores, and or rowhammer etc.

Thus, writing a robust and secure OS may actually be possible by competent programmers in most compiled languages. Best of luck =3

But how does it accomplish that? And how can you guarantee it would solve those hardware issues?
The memory areas would appear as ciphertext to other processes/unprivileged-cores in most cases even when hardware has glitched up. If you are asking how they specifically implemented the mmu <-> unreachable key handling outside the OS, that information was never public if I recall.

I've often pondered how it was really implemented too. Best of luck. =3

"Why Multi-Threaded Code Can Sometimes Misbehave (Weak Memory Concurrency)" (Computerphile)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3hvLz717zM