Opportunities and Challenges on Merging HW Security Features into Linux Mainline Kernel
summary
Hardware features that land quickly share concrete properties: clear ABI compatibility, a simple enable path, and at least one large adopter. Examples: protection keys: 4–5 use cases tried and still stalled after years, BTI and pointer authentication backward-compatible on ARM64, memory tagging pushed by Google to drive upstreaming. Practical blockers include corner cases (a kernel path passing wide floating point values broke an enablement), lack of a reusable kernel framework, and uncertain risk/reward that makes maintainers hesitate despite potential mitigation.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Panel introduction
- 3:08Hardware security challenges
- 6:00Upstreaming security obstacles
- 15:58Convincing maintainers
- 24:03Audience questions on regulation and adoption
- 31:46Operating system compatibility challenges
- 36:50Security versus adoption
- 42:10Closing remarks
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