Here is some interesting news for compiler writers worried about Meltdown. I have previously described a way to get hardware-based type checks (think branchless car, cdr, vector-ref, etc.) using alignment checks. It now appears that this technique may be immune to Meltdown-type attacks: Alignment Faults. Upon detecting an unaligned memory operand, the processor can (optionally) generate an alignment check exception (#AC). We found that the results of unaligned memory accesses never reach the ...
