Re: Explicit pointer provenance APIs for CHERI

On Wed, 24 Jun 2026 16:34:17 +0000
"Poul-Henning Kamp" <[email protected]> wrote:

> --------
> Alexander Ziaee writes:
> 
> > 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
> 
> As long as there is a cheri(7) manualpage to get people started...

IIUC, CHERI can be implemented both as software (emulation?) and
hardware, and this seemingly confusing things.

CHERI'fied CPUs could be one of the target archs for FreeBSD.
(Actually, ARM-derived for now, but more can inplement, theoretically.)

Of course, implementations in hardware (processor) would be
the best way. (In other words, "What hardware can do best
should be done by hardware, not microcodes or upper layers."
like basically taken in mainframes.) But still requires
some porting efforts.

I could find a derived works forking from FreeBSD.
  https://www.cheribsd.org/


> -- 
> Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
> [email protected]         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
> FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
> Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
> 
> 


-- 
Tomoaki AOKI    <[email protected]>