SmartMIPS is a an Application Specific Extensions (ASE) which originally developed with focus on enhancing security of Smartcards. The first implementation of SmartMIPS was the 4KSd. SmartMIPS is the umbrella for a number of very different CPU core features the most important of which are:
- Extensions to the processor architecture to accelerate software implementations of public and secret key cryptography
- Support for 1kB and 2kB page sizes.
- New TLB bits allow disabling execute permission of readable pages and pages that are writable but not readable.
- Code density optimization through the MIPS16 ASE.
Where the TLB no-exec and no-read flags are available available Linux will use them to implement non-executable stacks for enhanced security. Currently these are supported by 4KSd and the cnMIPS CPU cores of Cavium SOCs.
