Brooks Davis
Brooks Davis is a Principle Research Scientist at Capabilities Limited. He holds a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from Harvey Mudd College (1998). Since 2012 he has worked on the CHERI project and leads the engineering effort for CheriBSD, a memory safe UNIX-like operating system. He has co-authored more than 15 papers on CHERI in contexts including security, operating systems, programming languages, and architecture.
Prior to joining Capabilities Limited in 2025, Brooks worked on CHERI and CheriBSD at SRI International and before that worked on high-performance computing and networking at The Aerospace Corporation. Brooks Davis has been a member of the FreeBSD open-source operating system project since 2001 and has served on the project's elected core team. He is also a Visiting Industrial Fellow at the University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology (Computer Laboratory).
Session
After a decade and a half of academic and industrial research, products using CHERI to provide hardware enforced, deterministic memory safety are making their way to market. CheriBSD, a research fork of FreeBSD, has been the primary vehicle for operating system research on supporting CHERI's memory safety and compartmentalization potential. We are now bringing the most complete and stable work from CheriBSD to FreeBSD with the goal shipping FreeBSD 16 with spatial and temporal memory safety. This talk will motivate this upstreaming, explain our plan, and cover progress to date. We hope to update the FreeBSD community on our progress and encourage other BSDs to learn from our adoption of CHERI.