Reply To: Memory

p.s. Forgot to respond to your protection question:

The spiller has its own region of the address space. Spiller space is used for all processes, and the save state of the different processes are not in the process’s address space and so cannot be directly addressed by the program. In effect you can think of the spiller having its own private PLB, although it need not (and so far is not) implemented that way.

Utilities like debuggers and stack unwinders get access to saved state through an API that runs with PLB rights to spiller space; in effect the API is another process. The API is restricted; you cannot arbitrarily change the downstack links for example. As a result, the usual stack-smash exploit is impossible on the Mill.

Because the application cannot address spiller space, there is no synchronization needed between app use of memory and spiller use of memory; they are necessarily disjoint.