Compiling "Hello World"

These instructions are intended for use on an Arm Morello board, and install hybrid ABI versions of key toolchain and utilities using pkg64. The commands will (eventually) work the same on CHERI-RISC-V, but output details and registers in GDB will differ.

Toolchain installation

You will need the Morello LLVM toolchain and Morello GDB for this exercise. To install LLVM, use the command:

pkg64 install llvm-base

If this is the first time you are using pkg64 on this system, you will be prompted to bootstrap the pkg package before the package database is downloaded and you are prompted to confirm before installing llvm and its dependencies:

root@cheribsd:~ # pkg64 install llvm-base The package management tool is not yet installed on your system. Do you want to fetch and install it now? [y/N]: y Bootstrapping pkg from pkg+http://pkg.CheriBSD.org/CheriBSD:20220314:aarch64, please wait... Verifying signature with trusted certificate pkg.cheribsd.org.2022032901... done Installing pkg-1.17.5_1... Extracting pkg-1.17.5_1: 100% Updating CheriBSD repository catalogue... Fetching meta.conf: 100% 163 B 0.2kB/s 00:01 Fetching packagesite.pkg: 100% 4 MiB 1.4MB/s 00:03 Processing entries: 100% CheriBSD repository update completed. 20954 packages processed. All repositories are up to date. Updating database digests format: 100% The following 12 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked): New packages to be INSTALLED: gettext-runtime: 0.21 indexinfo: 0.3.1 libedit: 3.1.20210910,1 libffi: 3.3_1 libxml2: 2.9.13_2 llvm: 13,1 llvm-base: 1 llvm-morello: 13.0.d20220502_1 mpdecimal: 2.5.1 perl5: 5.32.1_1 python38: 3.8.13 readline: 8.1.2 Number of packages to be installed: 12 The process will require 902 MiB more space. 190 MiB to be downloaded. Proceed with this action? [y/N]: y [1/12] Fetching llvm-base-1.pkg: 100% 3 KiB 2.8kB/s 00:01 [2/12] Fetching llvm-13,1.pkg: 100% 11 KiB 11.2kB/s 00:01 ... [12/12] Fetching libedit-3.1.20210910,1.pkg: 100% 119 KiB 121.8kB/s 00:01 Checking integrity... done (0 conflicting) [1/12] Installing indexinfo-0.3.1... [1/12] Extracting indexinfo-0.3.1: 100% ... [12/12] Installing llvm-base-1... [12/12] Extracting llvm-base-1: 100% ===== ...

Note: By default FreeBSD ships with the vi and ee editors. You may wish to install the nano or vim package to access a more familiar editor. Currently only hybrid packages installable with pkg64 are available.

Source code

#include <stdio.h> int main(void) { printf("Hello world\n"); }

Building for CheriABI

To build a CheriABI Hello World program use:

cc -g -O2 -Wall -o helloworld helloworld.c

You can verify this is a CheriABI binary with the file command:

root@cheribsd:~ # file helloworld helloworld: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, ARM aarch64, C64, CheriABI, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /libexec/ld-elf.so.1, for FreeBSD 14.0 (1400094), FreeBSD-style, with debug_info, not stripped

Building for the Benchmark ABI

To target the Benchmark ABI, add the argument -mabi=purecap-benchmark to the cc command line:

cc -g -O2 -Wall -mabi=purecap-benchmark -o helloworld helloworld.c

You can verify this is a Benchmark ABI binary with the file command:

root@cheribsd:~ # file helloworld helloworld: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, ARM aarch64, C64, CheriABI, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /libexec/ld-elf.so.1, for FreeBSD 14.0 (1400094), FreeBSD-style, pure-capability benchmark ABI, with debug_info, not stripped

Running

Run the program:

root@cheribsd:~ # ./helloworld Hello world

Debugging

First, if it is not already installed, install the CHERI GDB debugger:

pkg64 install gdb-cheri

You can then debug helloworld by running GDB and setting a breakpoint on main:

root@cheribsd:~ # gdb ./helloworld GNU gdb (GDB) 12.1 ... Reading symbols from ./helloworld... ... (gdb) b main Breakpoint 1 at 0x10a14: file helloworld.c, line 6. (gdb) r Starting program: /root/helloworld Breakpoint 1, main () at helloworld.c:6 6 printf("Hello world\n"); (gdb)

If you then step into the printf (or puts depending on optimization level) call you will see that GDB prints the capability argument with expanded information including bounds and permissions:

(gdb) s puts (s=0x1006e0 [rR,0x1006e0-0x1006ec] "Hello world") at /home/bed22/cheri/cheribsd/lib/libc/stdio/puts.c:60 60 /home/bed22/cheri/cheribsd/lib/libc/stdio/puts.c: No such file or directory.

The argument can also be examined directly as either an integer or capability register:

(gdb) info reg x0 x0 0x1006e0 1050336 (gdb) info reg c0 c0 0x905f400046ec06e000000000001006e0 0x1006e0 [rR,0x1006e0-0x1006ec] (gdb)

If a capability (either in memory or a register) contains a null-derived value, it is displayed as a simple scalar value without any attributes. If a capability is not null-derived but is untagged, the string "(invalid)" is displayed after the bounds.

Capability tags in memory can also be examined by passing the "m" flag to the eXamine command. For example, compare the output of the internal FILE structure used for stdout in libc:

(gdb) p *__stdoutp $1 = {_p = 0x0, _r = 0, _w = 0, _flags = 8, _file = 1, _bf = {_base = 0x0, _size = 0}, _lbfsize = 0, _cookie = 0x403a8400 [rwRWE,0x403a8230-0x403a87a0], _close = 0x402bade5 <__sclose> [rxRE,0x4018e000-0x407f0000] (sentry), _read = 0x402bada5 <__sread> [rxRE,0x4018e000-0x407f0000] (sentry), _seek = 0x402baddd <__sseek> [rxRE,0x4018e000-0x407f0000] (sentry), _write = 0x402badc1 <__swrite> [rxRE,0x4018e000-0x407f0000] (sentry), _ub = { _base = 0x0, _size = 0}, _up = 0x0, _ur = 0, _ubuf = "\000\000", _nbuf = "", _lb = {_base = 0x0, _size = 0}, _blksize = 0, _offset = 0, _fl_mutex = 0x0, _fl_owner = 0x0, _fl_count = 0, _orientation = 0, _mbstate = {__mbstate8 = '\000' <repeats 127 times>, _mbstateL = 0, _mbstateP = 0x0 }, _flags2 = 0} (gdb) x/16gxm __stdoutp <CHERI Tag 0 for range [0x403a8400,0x403a8410)> 0x403a8400: 0x0000000000000000 0x0000000000000000 <CHERI Tag 0 for range [0x403a8410,0x403a8420)> 0x403a8410: 0x0000000000000000 0x0000000000010008 <CHERI Tag 0 for range [0x403a8420,0x403a8430)> 0x403a8420: 0x0000000000000000 0x0000000000000000 <CHERI Tag 0 for range [0x403a8430,0x403a8440)> 0x403a8430: 0x0000000000000000 0x0000000000000000 <CHERI Tag 0 for range [0x403a8440,0x403a8450)> 0x403a8440: 0x0000000000000000 0x0000000000000000 <CHERI Tag 1 for range [0x403a8450,0x403a8460)> 0x403a8450: 0x00000000403a8400 0xdc5fc00047a08230 <CHERI Tag 1 for range [0x403a8460,0x403a8470)> 0x403a8460: 0x00000000402bade5 0xb05fc000bf0618e7 <CHERI Tag 1 for range [0x403a8470,0x403a8480)> 0x403a8470: 0x00000000402bada5 0xb05fc000bf0618e7