I haven't exactly seen an outpouring of consumer demand for CHERI.

sph 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Is there an outpouring of hardware offer for CHERI? I'm a random nobody, but I'm sitting on this design for a message-passing platform that can only truly perform in a world where processes live in a single address space, which requires CHERI hardware to be feasible (or secure) at all.

CHERI would open many doors in operating system design and security, and it's stagnant because it's not a real thing yet, there's no CPU one can buy that supports it in any way outside of research. Without CHERI, we're stuck with security models from the 1970s. Most people are fine with 1970s design, but the OS research world has been itching for something like this for decades.

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leoc 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Right: it's not clear whether the availability of some $300 US CHERI SBCs would be enough to carry CHERI to glory, but it would obviously generate a significant pop of awareness, support and grassroots activity. For their part the antis could then transition seamlessly from "nobody wants it lol" to "all these enthusiasts are so annoying and out of touch with reality lol" as is traditional. Instead, AFAICT, the CHERI leadership seems to be convinced that the next step is to present the business case for CHERI to people at or just below CxO level https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJhS2i7KVtI . Imagine how far Rust (or, earlier and further afield, Linux) adoption would have got if it had relied solely on having an academic-led consortium present a business case to CxOs, instead of being pushed along by internal pressure from mid-level technical staff who had used it themselves and were crazy about it.

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pjmlp an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Tell ARM about it, https://cheri-alliance.org/discover-cheri/cheri-products/mor...

	▲	leoc 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's a lot better than things apparently used to be, but what CHERI really needs to develop a grassroots is a board that runs CheriBSD ( https://www.cheribsd.org/ ) and is actually available for a few hundred US dollars cash down, not a board of which you can apply to, maybe, have a single unit eventually allocated to you if you are deemed worthy. Even taking for granted that they only have a small supply which has to be allocated on a non-commercial basis for now, they should be beating down the doors of guys like Jeff Geerling and Wendell Wilson from Level1Techs and thrusting eval boards in their hands, not sitting on their throne waiting to hear entreaties.

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panick21_ an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not saying end consumer, I mean companies who have to insure safety and reliability. That is also behind adoption of things like Rust and many other trends.

CHERI gives you that and more. But its still very new and radical, and a lot of work needs to happen all over the place to make it practical.

Once you have micro-controllers and software it makes sense in lots of niches, and then it can expand.

For example, Google OpenTitan project. There is no reason not to use Cheri if the open source core supports it.