yep. I know Shawn of HBSD, and was an early supporter. I'm still mad about the way he was treated by some of the FBSD core devs. If you're going to go down this rabbit hole, HBSD is the correct solution. I understand FBSD's resistance now, though, when before I was just angry they appeared to be lazy and careless. Instead, they were just being patient and waiting for the correct solution.

It helps if you think of FreeBSD as not so much an end-user solution but also a research project and partially designed as a build-your-own-OS/appliance toolkit which is kind of the place it fills anyway. There are a lot of things not enabled/configured by default which is annoying, but you just have to bring your own default configuration with you.

Now that I see CHERI is on the horizon and RISC (ARM/RISC-V) is most definitely our future, I don't worry so much.

I'm also willing to bet Apple is one of the first mass market implementors of CHERI. They will definitely leverage it in future CPUs. It only makes sense -- they have their own compiler, their own kernel, and their own CPUs. Should be super easy to pivot to.