a feature of the Athlon 64

[Brian Kelsay]

Here's a little tidbit on XP that raised my eyebrows:

Finally, Service Pack 2 will also expose a seldom-discussed feature in 
the Athlon 64 architecture called Execution Protection, which prevents 
buffer-overrun errors on the hardware level by restricting the execution 
of certain buffer data. Whether or not the feature impacts the 
propagation of viruses remains to be seen; however, it is certainly good 
to see hardware manufacturers taking an active role in addressing 
security. Incidentally, Intel's Itanium supports the same feature, 
though you won't see any Itanium machines running Windows XP Professional.

I wonder if the 2.6 kernel uses this feature?

----------------------------------------------
Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.