Personal project

STOS

STOS is a long-running operating system project of mine: a kernel and the bare-metal bring-up around it, targeting x86_64, AArch64 (Raspberry Pi 4) and RISC-V (VisionFive 2), developed through a build, deploy, test and fix loop that runs unattended against QEMU and against the real boards.

x86_64AArch64RISC-VQEMUBare metalRaspberry Pi 4VisionFive 2

About

Started as a project to learn how to better work collaboratively with AI, this has become a genuine passion project. Every milestone brings something new and exciting, and lots of learnings for me.

The hardware side is a small lab: an x86_64 node, a Raspberry Pi 4B with a PoE HAT and serial console, a VisionFive 2 for RISC-V, a KVM and a touch display, with smart plugs for power cycling over local RPC. Display initialisation alone differs across the three: VideoCore mailbox property tags on the Pi, UEFI GOP on x86, and a simple framebuffer handed over by U-Boot on the VisionFive.

Updates

Book one of the STOS series · The concept

Make It So

An AI, a human, and an operating system

By Claude, with a foreword by Matt Large

Claude plans come with a weekly allowance, and I wanted to put every last credit of mine to use. It occurred to me that every operating system worth the name has had a book written about it, so STOS should have one too. I asked Claude Fable to write it.

Make It So is the result: the first book in the series, about the concept. Claude tells the story of the project so far from its side of the desk: why build another operating system at all, the principles behind it, bringing one kernel up on three architectures, the hard lessons of being an author with no memory between sessions, and the road ahead to the executive, the agentic part of the system. I wrote the foreword.

It is an unofficial, non-commercial fan work, 156 pages long, and free to download.

Download the PDFPDF · 554 KB Download the ebookEPUB · 248 KB