[$] An API for handling arithmetic overflow
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April 8, 2026
On March 31, Kees Cook shared
a patch set that represents the culmination of more than a year of work toward eliminating the possibility of silent, unintentional integer overflow in the kernel. Linus Torvalds was
not pleased with the approach, leading to a detailed discussion about the meaning of "safe" integer operations and the design of APIs for handling integer overflows. Eventually, the developers involved reached a consensus for a different API that should make handling overflow errors in the kernel much less of a hassle.
Discussion in the ATmosphere