Windows on Itanium also provided for hot-patching, in an even simpler way

This article discusses the hot-patching capabilities of Windows on Itanium, highlighting the fixed-sized instruction bundles and their implications for hot-patching. It also touches on the structure of Itanium binaries and the use of padding in function definitions.

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Last time, we looked at Windows hot-patching on 64-bit ARM . But what about Itanium?

Itanium also had fixed-sized instructions, or more accurately, fixed-sized bundles, where each bundle encodes three instructions. Fixed-size bundles mean that, like AArch64, there is no hot-patching restriction on the first instruction of a function.

In fact, there was no spare space for hot-patching at all.

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