CheriBSD: A research fork of FreeBSD

Brooks Davis <brooks@freebsd.org>

CheriBSD is a fork of FreeBSD to support the CHERI research CPU. We have extended the kernel to provide support for CHERI memory capabilities as well as modifying applications and libraries including tcpdump, libmagic, and zlib to take advantage of these capabilities for improved memory safety and compartmentalization. We have also developed custom demo applications and deployment infrastructure for our table demo platform. This paper discusses the challenges facing a long running, public fork of FreeBSD.