Userlevel process environments

CheriBSD 25.03 likewise supports three different userspace execution environments:

  • Hybrid processes provide strong binary compatibility with the non-CHERI version of the same architecture -- for example, aarch64 on Morello.

  • CheriABI processes support pure-capability code execution. This process environment implements strong referential, spatial, and heap temporal memory protection through the system-call interface, dynamic linker, language runtime including heap memory allocators, and compiler-generated code. This protects against memory memory-safety vulnerabilities in both system services and applications. See Building for CheriABI for information on building for CheriABI. CheriABI is described in an ASPLOS 2019 paper.

  • Benchmark ABI processes implement a code-generation model similar to CheriABI, but with relaxed program-counter capability bounds that enable improved performance prediction on the Arm Morello platform. See Building for the Benchmark ABI. The Benchmark ABI is described in a technical report on the topic from Arm and Cambridge.

All of these environments can be used over either of the hybrid or pure-capability kernels. You can determine the process environment that a particular process is using via the procstat(1) command, whose default output includes an EMUL column indicating the process ABI:

% procstat -a
  PID  PPID  PGID   SID  TSID THR LOGIN    WCHAN     EMUL           COMM
...
 3197  3193  3193  3193     0   1 robert   select    FreeBSD ELF64C sshd
 3214  3170  3214  3170  3170   1 robert   select    FreeBSD ELF64  bash
...

In this example, the sshd daemon is using CheriABI (FreeBSD ELF64C), and the bash command is using the Hybrid ABI (FreeBSD ELF64).

Pre-compiled third-party software applications (packages) are provided for each of these ABIs, although CheriABI and Benchmark ABI packages are currently considered experimental. This is discussed further in the chapter on packages.