ARM and Microsoft care about CHERI, that is enough to eventually make it happen, even if only on high integrity computing, like folks that still care about paying for Unisys ClearPath MCP.
Or eventually have its ideas come into the evolution of ARM MTE, Pluton, and Silicon, which increasingly becoming adopted, alongside the oldie SPARC ADI.
It is the x86 linage that keeps getting it wrong on hardware memory tagging solutions.
ARM and Microsoft don't "care" enough to do anything beyond a bit of token research. Maybe there will be some extremely niche chips one day, or maybe not because the problem can be solved 90% as well in software on ordinary hardware.
Microsoft and Apple will probably switch to CHERI RISC-V for their Secure Enclave/TPMs once it has proven itself in the field. That means there will be hundreds of millions of CHERI RISC-V processors in the world.
Not to mention the smartcard market which would mean billions of processors around the world.
The Intel Management Engine famously runs MINIX. Tanenbaum has called it "the most widely used computer operating system in the world" - but it hasn't exactly led to mainstream MINIX adoption.
Smartcards often run Java Card, which solves the whole memory safety problem the other way around. You don't need CHERI for this kind of limited platforms: want to run memory-safe C today? Just ban all dynamic memory allocations. Throw in the usual UB restrictions and stick to a single thread and very little can go wrong.
What's important to remember is that, despite its large deployment figures, those are still niche applications. The number of people developing for them is a rounding error. There is no clear path from there to mainstream adoption.
The problems with CHERI are not whether it's technically good or not, it's organizational. It's an academic project that requires everyone to boil the ocean. They tried to get ARM interested and that didn't go anywhere and now they're trying to get RISC-V interested. But they haven't addressed any of the problems of why manufacturers would ever make a complex and completely incompatible chip for a problem that they (the manufacturers) don't have and don't care about, that can probably be solved 90% as well in software.
You don't have to. Google already showed that the vast majority of memory safety bugs are in newly-written C code. Stop writing new C code (which the industry already seems to be moving towards) and the problem will eventually solve itself - even with plenty of C code still around.
Besides, very few (if any) pieces of code have been around for anywhere close to 50 years. Over time components naturally get refactored or rewritten for all sorts of reasons. And if you're rewriting anyways, why not switch to a more secure language? Don't allow C for rewrites and over the years every C component will eventually be replaced by a non-C one without forcing a big C-to-Rust rewrite.
Also, nothing new in C is just not happening, there is massive amounts of things that will not switch for decades.
Why not just switch to a slightly different compiler and core, and then you make all your old code safe without verifying it. And your new code in whatever language is also safe.
Also it helps with debugging. Also it helps you enforce security constraints on higher level.
CHERI also gives you features you can build more on-top off.
The silicon area and the performance hit are pretty minor, if it 'just' works for most code and most open source code just works, many people will want to use it.
Yes most bugs are new code, but plenty of bugs aren't and with CHERI I can be much more confident in running all that stuff. Specially older code that isn't as well used and tested as say Linux kernel.
However you can do what Airbus do and formally prove your C code and use a formally proven toolchain like compcert to compile it. Or you can take a performance hit and add bounds checking to the C code[1]. Aircraft systems are probably the best chance that CHERI has, and that's pretty niche, small runs and very expensive, and still better solved in software.
Most people on HN would run screaming away if they had to follow high integrity computing processes on their daily C programming.
If they think programming with Modula-2 and Object Pascal is programming with a straightjacket, good luck with MISRA, Frama-C, DOD and ISO certifications for reliable C code.
Is there an outpouring of hardware offer for CHERI? I'm a random nobody, but I'm sitting on this design for a message-passing platform that can only truly perform in a world where processes live in a single address space, which requires CHERI hardware to be feasible (or secure) at all.
CHERI would open many doors in operating system design and security, and it's stagnant because it's not a real thing yet, there's no CPU one can buy that supports it in any way outside of research. Without CHERI, we're stuck with security models from the 1970s. Most people are fine with 1970s design, but the OS research world has been itching for something like this for decades.
I'm not saying end consumer, I mean companies who have to insure safety and reliability. That is also behind adoption of things like Rust and many other trends.
CHERI gives you that and more. But its still very new and radical, and a lot of work needs to happen all over the place to make it practical.
Once you have micro-controllers and software it makes sense in lots of niches, and then it can expand.
For example, Google OpenTitan project. There is no reason not to use Cheri if the open source core supports it.
Is it valuable enough though. Looking at Google's stats Rust has several orders of magnitude fewer memory vulnerabilities even with `unsafe` (kind of the point). If C was at that level there's no way CHERI would have ever been proposed.
There are two counter-arguments:
1. There's a lot of C/C++ code still out there. You can't rewrite it all. I'm not totally convinced by that though because, a) do you need to? Google has shown that just writing new code in Rust is very effective, and b) AI is actually pretty decent at porting from C/C++ to Rust so maybe you can?
2. CHERI also allows really strong and fine grained compartmentalisation. This is absolutely fantastic for robustness, supply chain security and so on. If you want the absolute 100% most secure code possible, then Rust + CHERI with compartmentalisation is basically the best thing you can do. (Though Rust compartmentalisation is still not actually ready yet; it's in progress though.) That's really great but I'm not sure that level of security is needed by most projects, and also I think you can get pretty good compartmentalisation (though definitely not CHERI level) by doing something like what Xous does (basically isolation with processes/virtual memory, combined with the ability to call functions in other processes; IIRC Hubris OS does something similar).
CHERI is clever tech though and it would definitely be a boon for RISC-V if it succeeds.
The problem is that with LLVM, GCC, CUDA, Vulkan, POSIX, V8 and co, there will be lots of new C and C++ getting written as well.
Even on OpenJDK and CLR side, as new language features allow to rewrite even more runtime code from C++ into Java and C#, there is still new runtime code getting written in C++.
There is already clever tech for hardware memory tagging (SPARC ADI, and ARM MTE), CHERI is yet another way to tame unsafety on our computing stacks.
There's no real need for LLVM, GCC or CUDA to be memory safe. POSIX libc is of course C by definition but libc's are normally extremely well tested, and it is possible to avoid libc entirely if you want.
V8 is actually a nice case for CHERI since you can easily sandbox the JIT'd code. If you were to just rewrite V8 in Rust then you wouldn't get that benefit (you can't run the borrow checker on generated assembly). I assume they have some other sandboxing methods instead though.
But in general if you think about things like V8, that's used on high performance application class consumer CPUs. It's going to be at least 10 years before anyone has one of those with CHERI (unless ARM changes its mind about Morello). I would not bet against V8 being ported to Rust before that.
As I said I think CHERI is great technology and I hope it does succeed, but it does seem like the business case for it is not as strong as it was just a few years ago.
https://lowrisc.org/news/opentitan-earl-grey-2-to-support-ch...
Last year, Google announced that their Coral NPU will include CHERI:
https://developers.googleblog.com/en/introducing-coral-npu-a...
There are more cores that companies are actively working on:
X730 from Codasip https://codasip.com/solutions/riscv-processor-safety-securit...
ICENI from SCI Semiconductor: https://www.scisemi.com/products/iceni-device-family/