ARC Minutes 2024-12-17

Minutes

Content:

Season's greetings from the ARC.  Heading into the holidays, we had a shorter agenda than usual.  On a programming note, the ARC will next convene on January 8.

• Control-Transfer Records: The spec author identified a descriptive error in this ratified extension which, when taken literally, renders the corresponding feature essentially unusable.  In our assessment, the intended meaning should have become clear to implementers very quickly, and so we have recommended that the correction be treated as a clarification.

• Supervisor Domains Access Protection: We spent most of this meeting reviewing the Memory Protection Table design and discussing various use cases.  We've offered some feedback to the authors, including a recommendation to explore the possibility of supporting multiple table sizes and/or radixes to cover other use cases, in addition to confidental computing.  Review will continue in our next meeting.

• Security Model: We've begun reviewing this spec and have reached out to the authors to ask some clarifying questions.