The Red Hat developer blog looks at what’s coming in version 6 of the GNU Compiler Collection. “The x86/x86_64 is a segmented memory architecture, yet GCC has largely ignored this aspect of the Intel architecture and relied on implicit segment registers. Low level code such as the Linux kernel & glibc often have to be aware of the segmented architecture and have traditionally resorted to asm statements to use explicit segment registers for memory accesses….”
Read more at LWN
