Instruction execution protection
The instruction execution protection feature on IBM® mainframes protects against data execution, similar to the NX feature on other architectures.
Instruction execution protection prevents stack-overflow exploits and generally makes a system insensitive to buffer-overflow attacks.
Data instruction protection is available on IBM mainframe hardware with the IEP feature. For Linux® as a guest of a hypervisor, the hypervisor must support and use the instruction execution protection feature.
Instruction execution protection is available to your Linux instance if the features line in
/proc/cpuinfo includes iep.