[PATCH] aarch64: update NEWS about branch protection

Szabolcs Nagy szabolcs.nagy@arm.com
Wed Jul 29 08:08:50 GMT 2020


After some discussions it seems the original news was not clear
and that it is valid to manually pass the branch protection flags
iff GCC target libs are built with them too. The main difference
between manually passing the flags and using the configure
option is that the latter also makes branch protection the
default in GCC which may not be desirable in some cases.
---
 NEWS | 4 +++-
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/NEWS b/NEWS
index 1ef4a0a7a4..0e6ad5edc4 100644
--- a/NEWS
+++ b/NEWS
@@ -70,7 +70,9 @@ Major new features:
 
 * AArch64 now supports standard branch protection security hardening
   in glibc when it is built with a GCC that is configured with
-  --enable-standard-branch-protection.  This includes branch target
+  --enable-standard-branch-protection (or if -mbranch-protection=standard
+  flag is passed when building both GCC target libraries and glibc,
+  in either case a custom GCC is needed).  This includes branch target
   identification (BTI) and pointer authentication for return addresses
   (PAC-RET).  They require armv8.5-a and armv8.3-a architecture
   extensions respectively for the protection to be effective,
-- 
2.17.1



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