Talk:W^X

this article contains some hogwash. It implies that this protection is for the stack. No, this protection is supposed to apply to *all pages of the application*. &mdash;The preceding unsigned comment was added by 199.185.136.4 (talk &bull; contribs).

Theo de Raadt is hardly the *author* of OpenBSD. &mdash;The preceding unsigned comment was added by 213.152.49.34 (talk &bull; contribs).

Actually de Raadt is not OpenBSD author, but project initiator and leader. Additionally, AFAIK, W^X is used by Microsoft Windows, since XP SP2 - 217.150.206.254 19:13, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Sorry, W^X is an OpenBSD thing. Microsoft's is called Data Execution Prevention. NicM 19:50, 9 March 2006 (UTC).
 * Should W^X and Data Execution Prevention be merged? Traal 04:11, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
 * They are different implementations of similar things for different OSs (I'm not sure about how similar, I know DEP uses the NX bit which W^X doesn't, but I don't know how similar it is when the NX bit isn't available), so I don't really see that it is absolutely necessary. Both articles could just do with expansion, particularly Data Execution Prevention. I don't strongly object to a merge though, so long as it manages to avoid making out either that they are one and the same thing, or that W^X is a generic name, which it isn't. Hard to think of what is a generic name to merge them under though... Page protection already has another meaning, perhaps Non-executable page, or cleanup the horrible NX bit article and merge them both in there. NicM 08:10, 17 March 2006 (UTC).

This page states that W^X is not implemented on AMD64 processors, due to complexity issues, but the page on NX bit says it is implemented. Whose right? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 85.222.171.11 (talk • contribs).
 * W^X is implemented on amd64, and it seems it does use the NX bit. NicM 09:10, 10 April 2006 (UTC).
 * Thanks for clearing that up. —Pengo 12:55, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

I believe this article completly misses the point. W^X is not a feature or mechanism. It's a policy. There's nothing in the system that prevents mappings like this. The system has been simply cleaned up to never need this kind of mappings unless the software requests it (which no software in the default system does). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 84.79.228.107 (talk • contribs).
 * Yes, it probably does miss the point. I'll edit it (again). NicM 08:28, 22 May 2007 (UTC).
 * I must be completely blind, there are phrases like "policy" and "unless the application requests it" all over the place... is this better? NicM 08:38, 22 May 2007 (UTC).

We should probably reference the page on Harvard architecture here somewhere. Windreaper (talk) 21:21, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

JIT
Is there any documented case of things being left out of base OpenBSD because they use JIT compilation? --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 17:13, 23 August 2012 (UTC)