[Cryptech Tech] Alpha board strategy

[Ben Laurie]

On 25 February 2015 at 12:21, Peter Gutmann <pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
> Ben Laurie <benl at google.com> writes:
>
>>> but I also don't think going with that is a very good idea.
>>
>>Pah. Any particular reason?
>
> From a business point of view, you're asking manufacturers to go with an
> experimental research CPU implemented as a soft-core rather than a standard
> SoC or IP core on an FPGA, using experimental patches (not in the mainstream
> branch) to an existing compiler.  That kinda screams "run away" to any
> commercial vendor.

Perhaps I am not understanding the goals then. I thought part of the
point was to avoid backdoors, which kinda screams "run away" _from_
any commercial vendor (of CPUs, anyway)...

> From a practical point of view, you now need to write (or modify) code to take
> advantage of the capabilitie features rather than using off-the-shelf code,
> and figure out why it doesn't work, and possibly debug the tools you're using
> to work with it.  See above for "run away".
>
> That's not to say that CHERI isn't a nice piece of work, but there's quite a
> gap between "cool proof of concept" and "ready for commercial prime-time".
>
> Peter.