🌟 BIG NEWS!! The CHERI Alliance now distributes Arm Morello boards 🌟
... the #CHERI development journey continues beyond DSbD
The CHERI Alliance is thrilled to announce that, following the end of the Digital Security by Design (DSbD) program, we have taken over distribution of the Arm Morello CHERI development boards. These boards, developed as part of the DSbD program and funded by the UK government, feature a chip developed by Arm with a powerful CHERI processor. We are excited to keep making a vital research and development platform available to the community — to discover and experiment with CHERI, but also to develop or port existing software and tools.
If you or your team are interested in obtaining a Morello board (research, teaching, prototyping, or evaluation), please contact the CHERI Alliance and tell us about your use case: https://cheri-alliance.org/contact/
Available boards are limited, so we will prioritise requests and loan the boards to the teams who will put them to the best use.
👉 We’ll be coordinating fulfillment and next steps soon. Please share this post and tag colleagues who should see it.
Excited to enable the community to use CHERI — let’s build the future of safer hardware and software together! 🙌
RE: https://infosec.exchange/@cheri_alliance/115304565481924558
Morello is a modified quad-core Neoverse N1 with CHERI support. The UK Government funded a lot of the development and there are a few tens of them left over that don't yet have homes.
They look like real computers (ATX case, HDMI out). The under my desk runs CheriBSD (FreeBSD fork), KDE with its Wayland compositor and a bunch of userspace apps, with everything including the GPU drivers memory safe. It can also run AArch64 binaries, but that's less fun.
If you're doing interesting research that would benefit from CHERI or if you are looking to evaluate building products on CHERI systems, reach out to the CHERI Alliance.
CHERI RISC-V (the 'Y' base) is near to standardisation, so there should be RISC-V CHERI application cores available fairly soon, but the Neoverse N1 is a fairly advanced microarchitecture (designed for server chips) and it will probably take a while for RISC-V chips to equal it in performance. It was a fairly rushed conversion to CHERI, so has a few significant performance artefacts that won't be there in a production chip, but this is still probably the best opportunity to get a desktop CHERI system for at least the next year or two.