According to: http://www.openbsd.org/amd64.html W^X will not work on Intel's 64 bit chips. I for one chose to go with i386 on my Core 2 because of this fact alone.
Then I saw this: http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20041011182310.html and scores of other pages that refer to the XD bit. On another page (sorry.. lost the link) a person claimed that newer chips (I believe around the beginning of 2005) started shipping it and that it would work on OpenBSD. As this person is who-knows-who I can't really put much to that. http://processorfinder.intel.com/ shows the Core 2's having "Execute Disable Bit" Then I see dmesg like the following: http://www.webservertalk.com/archive249-2007-1-1783328.html http://readlist.com/lists/openbsd.org/misc/10/54208.html Here next to the Core 2 we see NXE So I dunno... it looks to me like it is supported. I haven't had a chance to look at how the code functions... but would the kernel use W^X based on NXE being available? Or does it have some other code that might see it is Intel (or use some particular method of checking for the bit that might not work on Intel's implementation). Basically... I can't confirm if it works or not. And if I switch my server over to AMD64... will NXE in the dmesg really let me know that it is indeed working correctly? If indeed W^X is now supported on newer Intel chips... could someone update the AMD64 page? I know that when I was buying my current hardware I considered going AMD for this comp because I saw that. Then the prices fell on Core 2's and I went ahead with it because it does indeed seem faster. I know that Intel has been lame by not giving good documentation and perhaps this could sting them back a bit by putting people off. But it seems at this point (2-3 years after they started adding NXE) it would be good to go ahead and say if it is supported. Perhaps I am wrong and their version of NXE is really a bunch of bull and is not applicable, making the statement true. But if indeed it is supported on newer chips... it seems fair to be honest about it so users of OpenBSD don't make uninformed decisions.
