Getting help

CheriBSD is a community-supported open-source research operating system. While every effort has been made to engineer to a high quality, many aspects of OS design for CHERI processors remain active research, and there are constrained engineering resources available to build, maintain, and support the system. As you gain experience with CheriBSD, your help in supporting newcomers in the community will be greatly appreciated.

GitHub issue tracker and pull requests

CheriBSD is developed and maintained in the CheriBSD GitHub repository, which includes an issue tracker in which bugs can be reported, as well as permitting pull requests to be submitted.

This document is also maintained in a GitHub repository, and your feedback and improvements would be very much appreciated.

CheriBSD Slack on cheri-cpu.slack.com

Support for CheriBSD is provided via the CHERI CPU Slack, where a number of topic-specific channels can be found:

  • #cheribsd;

    CheriBSD, its features, releases and future plans.

  • #debuggers;

    GDB extended to support CHERI.

  • #qemu;

    QEMU-CHERI, QEMU system and user modes for Morello and CHERI-RISC-V.

  • #software-porting.

    Third-party software adaptations to CheriABI and CHERI-enabled achitectures, CheriBSD ports and Poudriere.

CheriBSD mailing lists

There are also several CheriBSD email lists available:

In-person events and meetings

You can meet with the CheriBSD developers at a number of conferences and other events, including:

  • UKRI Digital Security by Design (DSbD) All Hands meetings that take place in the UK twice annually to discuss the Morello architecture, board, and its use.

  • FreeBSD developer summits and conferences around the world, including (when it takes place) the BSDCan conference in Canada, and the EuroBSDCon conference in Europe.

There is discussion around creating further, more frequent CHERI workshops in the UK in the future.

Most CheriBSD developers are based at the University of Cambridge (UK) and SRI International (USA), and it is possible to set up meetings with them directly. Get in touch if this would be useful to you.