zxombie

That is correct. We have FPGAs, qemu, and formal models (that can boot an OS) of CHERI-RISC-V and CHERI-MIPS. Most software development uses qemu as it is faster than the FPGAs at around 100MHz.

Having something in the GHz range will give us a chance to try things we are currently struggling with, e.g. fuzzing is painfully slow.

We (University of Cambridge) have added it to MIPS and RISC-V. As the same team did both of these they feel similar. Arm is working closely with us to add it to their architecture, but it has a few differences, mostly to allow for experimentation to see what should be added to the future production architecture.

There will be a simulator later this year. I expect CheriBSD on Morello will released at the same time with a feature set compariable with MIPS and RISC-V.

They are only partially correct about FreeBSD. In FreeBSD 12 there is no coverage sanitizer as it was added to 13 and never merged to 12.

Support for KASAN, and the other sanitizers is in development, however I'm currently too busy working on other things to have time to finish it.

There were some security issues in systrace. /http://www.watson.org/~robert/2007woot/

There is a RISC-V section as we (I work on CHERI) are interested in making sure it's a portable model. There's no point creating this if we can only ever use it on MIPS.

You don't need the FPGA board. I work on CHERI and have only ever used qemu. The FPGA is mostly useful for benchmarks to compare with MIPS.

There is also a FreeBSD port: http://www.freshports.org/devel/libtrue/

booting on the Dragonboard is unlikely to happen any time soon, I started working on it, but don't have the time to get it into a usable state (and lack hardware to test).

Source: I started & mostly work on the the FreeBSD arm64 port.

RISC-V seems to be lacking on the software side, e.g. where is the upstream support for Linux, GCC, or llvm? There is support in FreeBSD, but only because one of the FreeBSD committers was able to work on this full time (I've been providing advice to him as I ported FreeBSD to arm64 & have an office next to his).

I also have issues with the fact that many parts of the ISA are optional. A general purpose OS needs some common level of support by the hardware. If it can't rely on some features it makes it difficult to support the different SoCs.

And FreeBSD has been booting on the Raspberry Pi 3 in AArch64 for a week. https://twitter.com/zxombie/status/706526055373414400

It's being worked on in part to help find issues with the spec.

Because, on FreeBSD, armv6 is for 32-bit ARMv6 and later platforms. The userland is shared between all armv6 SoCs, however the kernel is targeted depending on the architectures it will boot on and will be built for ARMv7 when applicable.