Building image files

CheriBSD can be built natively on an existing CheriBSD system (e.g., on an Arm Morello box), and it can also be cross-built from FreeBSD, Linux, and macOS. Building natively from an ISA-level emulator, such as QEMU, is not recommended for performance reasons.

  • Native builds follow the same build procedure as used for the baseline FreeBSD operating system. Suitable git command-line substitions must be made to use CheriBSD rather than FreeBSD source code.

  • CheriBSD cross-build orchestration is performed by the Python-based cheribuild tool, which is able to build CHERI-enabled toolchain, operating-system stack, and various applications and other software used by the CHERI project.

Key source repositories

CheriBSD repositories currently reside in the CTSRD-CHERI GitHub Organization:

Unless you intend to modify CheriBSD, CHERI Clang/LLVM, CHERI GDB, or QEMU-CHERI, you should not generally need to manually check out or compile most of the above repositories. Instead, existing prebuilt software images/packages should be used, or the cheribuild command, which will orchestrate software cross-build for you.

Checking out cheribuild

cheribuild is a Python-based build orchestration tool that is the preferred way to cross-build CheriBSD. It can be checked out from GitHub:

git clone git@github.com:CTSRD-CHERI/cheribuild.git

Building and running CheriBSD/RISC-V in QEMU

The following command builds a CheriBSD/RISC-V live image, and boots it in QEMU-CHERI:

% ./cheribuild.py -d build-and-run-cheribsd-riscv64-purecap

Building and running CheriBSD/Morello in QEMU

The following command builds a CheriBSD/Morello live image, and boots it in QEMU-CHERI:

% ./cheribuild.py -d build-and-run-cheribsd-morello-purecap

Building CheriBSD/Morello release images

The following command builds a CheriBSD/Morello installer (memstick) image suitable to write to a USB stick:

% ./cheribuild.py -d --clean cheribsd-release-morello-purecap

The resulting image file will be generated in a file with a name along the lines of: output/cheribsd-release-morello-purecap/FreeBSD-14.0-CURRENT-arm64-aarch64c-memstick.img. This is relative to your cheribuild destination root, which is, by default, ~/cheri.

Obtaining further information

The cheribuild README.md provides detailed information on various parameters and targets its supports, as well as its dependencies.