Keyboard shortcuts

Press ← or → to navigate between chapters

Press S or / to search in the book

Press ? to show this help

Press Esc to hide this help

Product vision

Core principles are the driving force for ctos. Tracks and nicknames are subordinate. Non-negotiable: honesty ledger, antifragility (fail-closed + ratchets), security (threat model, probed mitigations only), performance (measure first), document-first / one-PR loops. principles.md.

What ctos is

ctos is a learning and research bare-metal OS kernel written in Rust for AArch64 (arm64 primary; ADR-003). The near-term product is a QEMU virt guest that owns the machine after -kernel load: UART text, then exceptions, paging, a heap, and a tiny scheduler — in that order.

It exists so we can study kernel mechanics with a document-first harness: claims stay honest, failures become sensors, and agents do not merge their own work. After M9 that harness sits on three first-class pillars — antifragility, security, and performance (ADR-011). Security and speed are not afterthoughts; they still need probes before anyone writes “secure” or “fast.”

What ctos is not

  • Not a production operating system, desktop, or app runtime. Probed guest samples: apps-today.md.
  • Not a Linux distro, not POSIX, not a container host. Porting stance: building-or-porting.md. No filesystem today: filesystem.md. Gaps to host apps: host-apps.md.
  • Not a florist / commerce platform and not a clone of any shop case study.
  • Not a Raspberry Pi (or other board) port until a board probe exists.
  • Not a claim that QEMU boot, CI, hardware bring-up, a “secure OS,” an “immutable OS,” or a published bench is finished until a probe says so. Scoped immutability: immutability.md.
  • Not an x86_64-primary kernel. x86_64 may become a secondary target later; it is not implemented now.

Success (current horizon)

A new session can read the vision, principles, overview, what can run today, building or porting, host-app gaps, architecture, honesty ledger, and latest daily brief, then take one roadmap milestone to a GitHub PR without inventing status.