zlacker

It's important to note that this is "just" a recompile, but it's the kind of recompile that you need to port 32-bit software to 64-bit. Pointers on CHERI are 128+1 bits, and software that treats long longs as a good place to put pointers are common. There's a lot of code that is going to need some sort of rewrite to be able to take advantage of CHERI capabilities. (But the problem is not insurmountable: WebKit already runs to some capacity, so it's reasonable to take even very low-level bit twiddling code and make it work on this platform.)

>>saagar+(OP)
Yes it's non-zero, though https://www.capabilitieslimited.co.uk/pdfs/20210917-capltd-c... is a recent exploration of what it takes to port X11 and KDE to CHERI. Of the around 6 million lines of C and C++ code involved, only about 0.026% needed to be touched, or just under 1.6k. That number will of course vary significantly between the type of code; boring applications code generally doesn't need changes (e.g. htop and sudo built and ran out of the box for me recently, as examples), but language runtimes will need significant changes. Pages 21, 22, 26 and 27 of that report have the per-component breakdown of that number.