Booting FreeBSD on BERI

We have implemented an open-source, soft-core, multi-threaded, 64-bit MIPS R4000-style CPU called BERI to support research on the hardware/software interface.  We have ported FreeBSD to this platform including support for multi-threaded and multi-core symmetric multi-processing.  This talk covers our motivations for a new CPU implementation, an overview of our FPGA based research platform, and an overview of the interesting points in the boot process from an OS porter's perspective.

The BERI platform is the basis for our work on memory capabilities to support improved memory safety and compartmentaltization granularity in C and higher level programming languages.  More information on our project can be found on our project web site at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/.