The NX feature, which is also being marketed as Enhanced Virus Protection, prevents the execution of malicious code and protects against buffer overflow attacks. It is already available in AMD’s and Intel’s 64-bit processors, and will be supported in Intel’s forthcoming Prescott chips as well as Transmeta’s Efficeon and VIA’s C5J Esther core.
NX will also be supported in Microsoft Corp’s Windows XP Service Pack 2, due in the middle of this year, and now the Linux kernel. The patch Red Hat has contributed to the kernel is based on prototype code developed by Intel and has also been integrated into the Fedora Core 2 version of its Linux distribution.
Linux creator Linus Torvalds has given his blessing to the patch, commenting in a kernel mailing list discussion that the technology should be turned on by default in the Linux kernel so long as it appears that it does not affect the smooth running of legacy Linux applications.
