Adding kernel control-flow-integrity checking to GCC

What happened

While many developers are struggling to keep up with the flood of vulnerability reports, others are still focused on preventing those reports from happening in the first place. Control-flow integrity (CFI) is the term for preventing (or at least detecting) exploits that divert the flow of control from its intended paths. At the 2026 GNU Tools Cauldron , Kees Cook presented his changes to the GCC compiler suite to support forward-edge CFI for the kernel.