Release Notes: 29 October 2020

The following release notes discuss installation and execution of the CheriBSD Developer Preview for Arm's Morello Architecture. You must download the disk image which will be used with Arm's FVP model and Docker so that you may try the features of this new hardware/software system.

Installation and Testing

The following directions will help you get up and running with the disk images provided with this Developer Preview. The images and software will run on macOS or Linux. The SHA-256 for the downloaded file is: 5e0d792e4326649cb3e36698fd391bb6982ff2b86734b459750bf088d08bcc3e

Pre-Requisites

Before you can run the software provided on this site you must first install a few systems and packages.

• Arm's FVP
• cheribuild

On macOS you will also need to install the following dependencies:

• brew install homebrew/cask/docker homebrew/cask/xquartz socat

Running the pre-built disk image

With the prerequisites installed you can run the disk image file that is part of this Developer Preview.

All of the following commands are to be executed from the cheribuild/ directory, which is created when you clone the cheribuild repo.

First you need to install the FVP in the correct location using the installer script that is supplied with the FVP release:

• ./cheribuild.py --install-morello-fvp/installer-path=/path/to/FVP_Morello_0.11_3.tgz install-morello-fvp

Now you can start the FVP and the associated disk image using the following command:

• ./cheribuild.py run-fvp-morello-purecap

You can see the progress of the FVP model and CheriBSD by using telnet to connect to various ports. By default the FVP is on port 5000, and the serial console for the operating system is on port 5003. Below is sample output from the serial console. The root user in the supplied image does not have a password set.

Starting background file system checks in 60 seconds.

Mon Oct 26 14:41:21 UTC 2020

FreeBSD/arm64 (cheribsd-morello-purecap) (ttyu0)

login: root
Oct 26 14:44:56 cheribsd-morello-purecap login[659]: ROOT LOGIN (root) ON ttyu0
Last login: Mon Oct 26 14:38:28 on ttyu0
FreeBSD 13.0-CURRENT (GENERIC-MORELLO) #1 b2ee285aff4-c328201(morello-dev)-dirty: Mon Oct 26 10:34:11 EDT 2020

Welcome to CheriBSD!

CheriBSD extends FreeBSD to implement memory protection and software
compartmentalization features supported by the CHERI ISA.

CheriBSD source may be found at https://github.com/CTSRD-CHERI/cheribsd/

We provide support via mailing list
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/cheri-lists.html.

Find out more about about CHERI at http://cheri-cpu.org/

# 

Using ssh to log in to the CheriBSD system from your host

The instance can be reached using ssh with

• ssh -p 21846 root@localhost

but the port may be different on your system.

Running the Exercises

Once you have verified that you can run the disk images you will want to try them out. We suggest trying the CHERI Exercises as a good way of learning how CHERI works as well as how to build software to run on the Developer Preview.