When I started the Adamantix project, one of the first things I did
was to add PaX functionality to the kernel. PaX is a process memory
protection patch.  Anything that happens outside the kernel on a
UNIX system happens inside a process. There are many attacks on the
Internet that try to corrupt the process memory, in order to make
it do something for which it was not intended. One example of such
an attack is the so called buffer overflow attack. This kind of
attack is one of the most popular at this moment.

PaX protects against such attacks. Or so the author claims. When I
started to add PaX to Adamantix, almost nothing happened. A few
libraries broke, but that was easy to fix, and that was it. I
expected many programs to break. So I started to wonder: ``Does
this patch really do anything?'' Instead of speculating, I decided
to write a test suite. After some time, the first version of paxtest
was ready. More functionality was added. With the addition of every
test, it proved that PaX was working just fine. I decided to publish
paxtest, because it can be useful for other people to test the
functionality of the memory protection of their system(s).