GCC and pointer overflows [LWN.net]

[ljknews at mac.com (ljknews)]

At 1:00 PM -0400 5/1/08, Epstein, Jeremy wrote:

> Ken, a good example.  For those of you who want to reach much further
> back, Paul Karger told me of a similar problem in the compiler (I don't
> remember the language)

VAX Pascal, before VMS was on Alpha (and long before Itanium).

> used for compiling the A1 VAX VMM kernel, that
> optimized out a check in the Mandatory Access Control enforcement, which
> separates information of different classifications (*).  [For those not
> familiar with it, this was a provably secure kernel on which you could
> host multiple untrusted operating systems.  Despite what some young-uns
> seem to think, VMs are not a new concept - they go back at least three
> decades that I know of, and possibly longer.  The A1 VAX effort ended
> roughly 20-25 years ago, to give a timeframe for this particular
> compiler issue.]

-- 
Larry Kilgallen