[jrtc27]

Stop-the-world is only brief, to scan the register file of each thread and any other capabilities held in the kernel (asynchronous I/O, signal handlers, etc). Once done the entire memory sweep can be done concurrent with execution.

As for porting, it very much depends what you're doing. Operating systems and language runtimes, especially those with JITs, have intimate knowledge of the architecture and like to play cute tricks with pointers, so those are disproportionately involved to port. General user code requires very little, if any, porting. In one study, a basic KDE+X11 desktop stack was ported to CHERI, seeing 0.026% LoC changes across 6 million LoC, or 1584 lines. It's non-zero, and of course there is a lot of code out there so even a tiny fraction of it isn't insignificant, but it is very small as these things go.

[comex]

> Stop-the-world is only brief, to scan the register file of each thread and any other capabilities held in the kernel (asynchronous I/O, signal handlers, etc). Once done the entire memory sweep can be done concurrent with execution.

Is there documentation of the scheme that allows this? I did some quick Googling and found CHERIvoke (which is not concurrent at all) and Cornucopia (which requires scanning some user pages while the world is stopped). Are you referring to something newer?

[chc4]

The Cornucopia Reloaded link in the OP is actually to the paper implementing this, I think, which I hadn't seen before.

[3np]

Potentially (likely) uninformed question: Doesn't this have the potential side-effect of wrecking L1/L2 caches? If so that could get quite pathological for many workloads.

Or is there some new fancy dedicated hardware registers involved?