Arm today sent out their third iteration of their Linux kernel patches for adding Arm Morello platform support to the kernel: an experimental extension of Armv8.2-A paired with the CHERI v7 ISA.
Arm Morello is a research program with the UK government for a new security architecture based on CHERI (Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions). Morello is part of the UK’s Digital Security by Design initiative. Arm Morello has been working on BSD support with CheriBSD and experimental Linux support using their Morello Linux project and upstreaming relevant bits like the DeviceTree to the mainline Linux kernel. With Morello Linux they are pursuing a pure capability kernel-user ABI and a musl libc + Morello-forked LLVM toolchain.
Sent out today were the v3 patches for getting Arm Morello support to the kernel following the other recent patches for laying out the DeviceTree DTS files for the for the Arm Morello System Development Platform. The Arm Morello System Development Platform is the initial developer platform for Morello:
The recent flow of Morello platform patches have been rebasing against newer versions of the kernel Git state and addressing review comments. These patches under review for mainlining are just around the DeviceTree support for this developer platform and not any kernel-user ABI changes or other architectural modifications for Morello with its combined ARM+CHERI ISA.
Those wishing to learn about the experimental Arm Morello work at large can find the project site at Morello-Project.org.
