Glibc 2.35 Removes The Long-Deprecated Intel MPX Support

Intel Memory Protection Extensions (MPX) never really took off and the Linux support has been deprecated for a while with the code elsewhere in the stack already having been removed while with the upcoming Glibc 2.35 release that GNU C Library is also flushing away its support.

Intel's Memory Protection Extensions were intended for checking of pointer references at run-time to avoid buffer overflows and other potential related vulnerabilities with Skylake and newer but adoption wasn't robust and other compiler-based alternatives have been more popular and seemingly just as effective. The Linux 5.6 kernel ended support for Intel MPX and MPX support was removed in the GCC 9 compiler. Now the GNU C Library has also removed its Intel MPX support.

Lasting until yesterday was the removal of MPX support in Glibc's ELF code for the dynamic loader.

Separately, other changes on the way for Glibc 2.35 include Unicode 14.0 support, support for the C.UTF-8 locale, and various updates around the draft ISO C2X specification. As with its existing release cadence, the GNU C Library 2.35 release should be out around the start of February.