Hot Take Armv9 Feature Support: Advanced Memory Protection for Android 14

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Notably, the Tensor G2 chipset in the Google Pixel 7 series uses Arm v8.2 CPU cores, hence they don’t support MTE. If the upcoming Google Pixel 8 series uses new Arm v9 CPU cores like many other flagship Android devices do, then they would have hardware capable of supporting MTE. It remains to be seen if this "advanced memory protection" feature will actually make it into the stable release, however.

Source: Android 14 may add an advanced memory protection feature to protect your device from memory safety bugs

What is Advanced Memory Protection?

It provides fine grained memory protection for detection and mitigation of memory safety bugs.

Arm v9 introduces Arm Memory Tagging Extension (MTE), a hardware implementation of tagged memory.

At a high level, MTE tags each memory allocation/deallocation with additional metadata. It assigns a tag to a memory location, which then can be associated with pointers that reference that memory location. At runtime the CPU checks that the pointer and the metadata tags match on each load and store.

Learn more: Arm Memory Tagging Extension | Android Open Source Project

FWIW; Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and Gen 2 use Armv9 processor cores.