RISC-V Specification for CHERI Extensions

This repository contains the CHERI extension specification, adding hardware capabilities to the RISC-V ISA to enable fine-grained memory protection and scalable compartmentalization.

The latest draft HTML version can be accessed at https://riscv.github.io/riscv-cheri and the latest PDF snapshot can be downloaded from https://github.com/riscv/riscv-cheri/releases.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY-4.0). For details, see the LICENSE file.

Contributors

The list of contributors to this specification is maintained in the contributors file.

For guidelines on how to contribute, refer to the CONTRIBUTING file.

Building the Document

Prerequisites

To build the document, you’ll need the following tools installed on your system:

Make
asciiDoctor-pdf, asciidoctor-bibtex, asciidoctor-diagram, and asciidoctor-mathematical
Docker
Python3

Cloning the Repository

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/riscv/riscv-cheri.git

Building the Documentation

To start the build process, run:

cd ./riscv-cheri && make all

The Makefile script will check the availability of Docker on your system:

If Docker is available, the documentation will be built inside a Docker container using the image riscvintl/riscv-docs-base-container-image:latest. This ensures a consistent build environment across different systems.
If Docker is not available, the documentation will be built directly on your system using the installed tools.

The documentation is generated from the AsciiDoctor source files in your project. The primary source file is specified by the HEADER_SOURCE variable in the Makefile.

The build process utilizes several options, including theming and font settings, and generates a PDF document as output.

Cleaning up

To clean up the generated files, run:

make clean

This will remove the generated PDF file.

Enabling pre-commit checks locally

The repository has some basic commit checks set up with pre-commit that will be enforced by the GitHub CI. To ensure these checks are also run in the local repository while making changes the following command can be run:

pip3 install pre-commit && pre-commit install

When enabling additional checks by editing .pre-commit-config.yaml, it is recommended to run to newly added check on all files in the repository. This can be done with the following command:

pre-commit run --all-files