Microsoft, please protect your stacks (was Re: [ih] ... stack?)

[James P. Salsman]

David,

Thank you for your message which I guess started from the 
internet-history list, not the ietf discussion list.

>... Lots of programs compile code into a temporary buffer and then execute 
> it.  The most interesting ones that I know of are in graphics support, 
> where various bitblt's and other highly parameterized, highly loopy code 
> process a lot of data. 

So, locking the stack against execution would slow graphics applications?
Maybe someone should let Intel know, since they are having a hard time 
convincing consumers that 2 GHz > 1 GHz.  It is pathetic how audio 
applications have been ignored.  Swaying my opinion would require a
different example. 

> Putting the temporary buffer on the stack is *good* 
> design, not bad - using a static buffer requires unnecesary locking, and 
> allocating with malloc() means handling the possibility of an "out of 
> memory" in a sensitive part of the system....

On the contrary, there is nothing wrong with a seperate code stack in its 
own segment.

Cheers,
James