Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/1065889/

On March 31, Kees Cook shared

a patch set that represents the culmination of more than a year of work
toward eliminating the possibility of silent, unintentional integer overflow in
the kernel. Linus Torvalds was

not pleased with the approach, leading to a detailed discussion about the
meaning of “safe” integer operations and the design of APIs for handling integer
overflows. Eventually, the developers involved reached a consensus for a
different API that should make handling overflow errors in the kernel much less
of a hassle.