Every layer here is written in-house. This is the honest version — what exists, how it fits together, and where the hard parts were.
Firmware runs
BOOTX64.EFI from the EFI system partition. It reads the memory map, picks a graphics mode,
and paints the first splash before the kernel exists.
A BOOTSLOT record names
the active slot and a trial counter. A slot that never confirms a successful boot is rolled back
automatically, so a bad kernel costs one reboot.
Long mode, page tables, IDT and the APIC are brought up by hand. Secondary cores are started and parked until the scheduler wants them.
USB mass storage, then NVMe, then IDE — the first volume that mounts as FAT becomes the root. The same image boots a USB stick and an internal drive.
Chrome expects Linux. Rather than port it, XerisOS answers as Linux at the only boundary that matters — the syscall.
The same binary a Linux desktop runs. XerisOS maps it, resolves its interpreter, builds the initial stack and auxiliary vector, and enters ring 3.
clone creates them, futex
blocks and wakes them, and they are scheduled across physical cores — the browser's compositor, IO and
worker pools all run concurrently.
memfd_create plus
mmap(MAP_SHARED) hands back pages the kernel and the process both see. Frame buffers are not
copied through a pipe.
sendmsg with SCM_RIGHTS moves file
descriptors between the browser and the compositor, which is how a rendered frame is handed over at all.
| Interface | What XerisOS provides |
|---|---|
| Wayland | An in-kernel compositor: wl_compositor, wl_shm,
xdg_shell, pointer, keyboard and axis events |
| epoll / poll | Readiness for pipes, sockets, eventfd and the compositor socket |
| Sockets | TCP and UDP over the in-house network stack, plus a DNS proxy |
| Filesystem | FAT32 and FAT16 with contiguous-run reads and crash-ordered writes |
| Audio | An ALSA-shaped ioctl surface over the Intel HD Audio driver |
No firmware blobs standing in for a driver, and no BIOS calls after boot. Each of these talks to the device the way its specification describes.
NVMe with its own submission and completion queues, AHCI, legacy ATA with DMA, and USB mass storage over xHCI.
Intel e1000 and Realtek Ethernet, plus a MediaTek MT7920 Wi-Fi driver with its own firmware upload and MCU handshake.
Intel HD Audio: codec enumeration, stream descriptors, and a cyclic buffer the mixer writes into.
A UEFI-provided linear framebuffer with a double-buffered compositor and damage-tracked blits.
PS/2 keyboard and mouse including the IntelliMouse wheel protocol, with typematic repeat handled in the driver.
Secondary cores brought up through the APIC, with the desktop pinned to the boot processor so the UI stays live under load.
Ari's weights load from the boot volume and run on the CPU. There is no account to create, no key to paste, and no request that leaves the machine — because there is no code path that could send one.
A formant synthesiser builds speech from phonemes: a glottal source, a cascade of resonators for the vowel tract, a parallel branch for fricatives, and radiation at the lips. Nothing is sampled or streamed.