Re: Explicit pointer provenance APIs for CHERI

On 2026-06-24 10:37 -04:00 EDT, "Konstantin Belousov" <[email protected]>=
 wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 24, 2026 at 10:54:51AM +0000, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
>> --------
>> Brooks Davis writes:
>>=20
>> > On Mon, Jun 22, 2026 at 10:11:36AM -0700, Adrian Chadd wrote:
>>=20
>> > > Specifically, I'd like a manpage which defines something top level f=
or these
>> > > terms and link to that manpage from manpages that talk about pointer
>> > > provenance and anything else that leads into CHERI related stuff.
>> >
>> > Lacking an obviously better place I've added a section to arch(7) and
>> > linked it from the various manpages.  https://reviews.freebsd.org/D578=
12
>>=20
>> Not bad, but I dont think there's any way around having a proper CHERI(7)
>> manual page too ?
>>=20
>> It doesn't have to be long, but it has to be there.
>=20
> The concept of the provenance is not specific to cheri, it is needed and
> used by the compilers on regular architectures.
>=20
> I think that instead of adding stuff to arch(7), we need a man page
> like memory_model(7).  There is already some items that would be more
> natural in memory_model.7 than in atomic.9, for instance.  Provenance
> is also the good subject for discussion there.

Can we massage it into memory(7)? I think that'd be the most obvious place.
The draft is very focused on just memory statistics, but I think it wouldn'=
t hurt
it to tweak that a little bit.

https://reviews.freebsd.org/D18768

Best,
Alex=