Showcase reel
These seven clips remain the canonical visual tour. The operating system has moved past
the captures: durable causal history, proof checks, saved lenses, a browser DAG, and the
scrub inspector are now part of the field surface.
New flagship / Window manager
wm.This is not a mockup: the screenshot is from the SlOS framebuffer. The window manager uses fixed tiled panels for CPU state, a causal event tail, tasks, and memory/system bars. It is keyboard-driven and intentionally non-composited.
slos:/$ wm
# 1024x768 framebuffer, fixed tiled panels
# CPU monitor | causal tail | task list | memory/system
# Tab focuses the next panel; q or Esc exitsComplete showcase video. Local ticks, IDs, disk state, and peer state may differ.
The machine enters through Multiboot, brings up x86 tables, paging, heap, interrupts, filesystems, PCI/VirtIO, network services, user programs, and the shell. The clip is the baseline: before causality is interesting, the target must boot repeatably.
VirtIO block I/O backs SlFS. Disk commands write, append, inspect, and re-read files from disk.img so operator state survives outside the RAM filesystem and across QEMU restarts.
The shell is a toolbench: editor, browser, wget, file filters, simple compilation, user ELFs, and diagnostics run on the same syscall and causal surface as the rest of the kernel.
ELF inspection, installation to SlFS, argument passing, and HEW SDK examples show code entering SlOS as programs rather than only as built-in kernel commands.
Notes are graph-native application state. Add, tag, search, export, and replay operate over timeline events, so the current note list is a reconstruction rather than an opaque file.
Named actors, local mailboxes, route tables, SPIFFE identity, Noise-encrypted mesh transport, and federation commands expose SlOS as a small distributed-system laboratory.
The final chapter is deliberately prosaic proof: a larger graphical program can run through the SlOS program path while the kernel remains inspectable underneath.
New plate / Remote workstation
The current remote story is intentionally plain: telnetd on guest port 23
(host localhost:2323 under QEMU) and noiseshd on port 5200.
The full-screen editor works because console cursor/clear/colour become ANSI and key
input is decoded from the session stream. Files under /home persist; services
that detach, such as httpd, keep running after disconnect.
host$ telnet localhost 2323
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
slos:/$ mkdir /home/day
slos:/$ edit /home/day/hello.sl
# full-screen editor over ANSI; arrows move, Ctrl-S saves, Ctrl-Q exits
slos:/$ cat /home/day/hello.sl
echo hello from a remote SlOS workstation
slos:/$ run /home/day/hello.sl
hello from a remote SlOS workstation
slos:/$ httpd
[httpd] Started (pid 35) -- http://localhost:8080/
slos:/$ exit
Connection closed.
host$ curl http://localhost:8080/
<!doctype html>...SlOS Explorer...New plate / Encrypted shell
noiseshd carries the same shell stream through a from-scratch encrypted
channel: ephemeral X25519 key exchange and ChaCha20-Poly1305 messages. It is not
OpenSSH, and it does not yet authenticate the server, so active impersonation remains
a known limitation.
host$ python3 scripts/noise-shell-client.py localhost 5200
# X25519 ephemeral handshake, then ChaCha20-Poly1305 frames
# Current limit: no server authentication yet; confidential, not OpenSSH.
slos:/$ termsize
80x25
slos:/$ logoutNew plate / SMP auto-offload
smp offload <n> creates unpinned, AP-safe kernel tasks. The BSP
may dispatch them to idle application processors and records the decision as
causal scheduler events. It remains cooperative and kernel-task-only.
slos:/$ smp offload 6
created 6 AP-offloadable kernel tasks
[ap] task ran on CPU 1
[ap] task ran on CPU 2
[ap] task ran on CPU 3
slos:/$ cpu
CPU ACTIVE CURRENT SWITCHES STATE
0 yes shell 1842 busy
1 yes idle/1 18 idle
2 yes idle/2 17 idle
3 yes idle/3 17 idleNew plate / Causal live tail
cwatch streams the graph.
The causal graph can now be watched like a log. cwatch or
cwatch tail prints recent context, then appends new events until
the operator presses a key.
slos:/$ cwatch tail
#8921 SHELL shell command: smp offload 6
#8922 SCHED sched offload pid=47 to=cpu1
#8923 SCHED sched offload pid=48 to=cpu2
#8924 SCHED sched offload pid=49 to=cpu3
# press any key to stopNew plate / TCP chatd
chatd is an IRC-lite TCP service on port 6667: up to eight
clients, /nick, join/leave announcements, and message broadcast
through the SlOS TCP stack.
slos:/$ chatd start
chatd: listening on TCP 6667
host$ nc localhost 6667
Welcome to SlOS chat. You are guest1.
/nick maple
*** guest1 is now maple
maple: hello from a real TCP clientNew plate / Shell pipelines
cmd1 | cmd2 now works for shell built-ins and kernel-proxied
diagnostics. The model is honest and simple: sequential stage capture, not
concurrent POSIX pipes, with a 4096-byte intermediate buffer.
slos:/$ ps | grep raft
slos:/$ events | tail -n 4
slos:/$ help | grep Network
slos:/$ wc
# sequential capture: each stage has a 4096-byte bufferNew plate / Web Causal Explorer
The userspace httpd serves /causal: a live SVG causal DAG
fed by /api/causal/graph, with state from
/api/causal/state. The page includes a time-travel scrubber and
click-to-focus causes/effects. No new clip exists yet, so this page records it as a
terminal plate.
slos:/$ httpd
httpd: serving SlOS pages and causal API
host$ xdg-open http://localhost:8080/causal
/causal
+----------------------------------------------------------+
| live causal DAG (SVG) |
| E418 syscall -> E419 sched -> E420 fs_op |
| \ \ |
| +--> E421 user timeline --> E422 journal spill |
| |
| scrub tick: [0 ------------------------------ now] |
| selected E421: causes E418,E419 / effects E422 |
+----------------------------------------------------------+New plate / Causal Inspector
scrub reconstructs state at a tick, inspects an event, emits JSON,
diffs two ticks, or asks the counterfactual impact of dropping an event. It is the
terminal companion to the browser slider.
slos:/$ scrub help
Causal Inspector
scrub <tick>
scrub event <id|last>
scrub whatif <id|last>
scrub diff <a> <b>
scrub json <tick>
slos:/$ scrub event last
Event #last type=... subsystem=...
Caused by (parents): ...
Led to (effects): ...New plate / Operator toolkit
The 551–558 toolkit reads the same event record and gives it an operator
rhythm. triage renders a one-screen verdict, cbisect
binary-searches replayable history for when a metric crossed a threshold,
cdb is a stateful debugger for causes, and cprof
profiles cause-to-effect flow across subsystem boundaries.
slos:/$ triage
SYSTEM TRIAGE (tick 281)
STATUS: HEALTHY
Next action: (system healthy - no action needed)
slos:/$ cbisect events 100
FOUND: tick 276 (events=2049, crossed from 0) after 8 probes
slos:/$ cprof
sched -> sched edges 1508 syscall -> sched * edges 1New plate / Sign, bundle, attribute
attest emits a self-contained Ed25519-signed receipt for one
outcome that attest verify re-checks against the node key;
capsule writes a portable incident bundle to SlFS; and
why -r tags each cause hop with its origin node.
slos:/$ attest verify last
RECEIPT VALID: event #528880 in signed segment 1;
Ed25519 signature verifies against node key
slos:/$ capsule last
CAUSAL CAPSULE for event #534692 ... saved to /capsule/534692.txt
slos:/$ why -r last
[540525] syscall: syscall 51 pid=30 origin=localDurable causality
Recent events still live in the causal ring, but the CJournal spills searchable,
read-through history to SlFS. Operators can use journal,
events -a, cq -a, why -a, proof-health
checks, and epoch/Merkle proof paths to inspect history after reboot.
slos:/$ journal spill-through last
slos:/$ events -a sched 4
source=journal ... SCHED ... switch
slos:/$ why --md last
# Why event ...
slos:/$ cq -a id=last epoch-proof --json-ish
slos:/$ journal proof-health --json-ish
proof_health{source=journal,status=PASS,...}Built and tested
The repository contains automated QEMU and offline checks for boot, manual command surfaces, durable journals, the web renderer, and lens persistence.
make smoke-boot
make manual-smoke
make causal-journal-check
make web-explorer-check
make lens-persist-check
