[K] Freestanding kernel
A 64-bit C/asm kernel with its own GDT/IDT, paging, physical and virtual memory managers and a preemptive scheduler. Ring 0 kernel, Ring 3 apps via SYSCALL/SYSRET.
// the full tour
Everything in the box.
MayteraOS is a complete, self-built system: an AI that can drive and reprogram the machine, broad foreign-software compatibility, real multiprocessing and networking, and a desktop with its own apps. The screenshots below are real framebuffer captures.
// the headline feature
An AI woven into the OS.
MayteraOS ships a built-in AI chat assistant that does not just talk: it reads the same tool contracts every app publishes, operates apps on your behalf, and, with your consent, can generate and run brand-new ones, all under a capability-token and audit system.
Chat that controls the system, and can extend it
Every app, widget and game ships a machine-readable YAML tool contract. The assistant reads these contracts to discover what it can do, then calls them through a loop of actions and observations: list files, open a web page, read the weather widget, change a setting.
It goes further than operating what already exists. Describe a small app or widget in plain English and the assistant can generate real source for it, compile it, and launch it as a running window, with no code shown to you unless you ask to see it. In a verified run, “build me a tip calculator” produced a correctly-working app from a single request.
- Tool-contract protocol exposes the whole desktop to the AI
- Capability tokens: scoped, time-bounded grants per action, from reading a file to compiling and deploying code
- Consent gates on every meaningful action, naming exactly what is being requested
- Every grant, denial and action is written to an append-only audit log
Proven: reading state, operating apps, and one-shot app generation and launch. Designed but not yet proven end to end: conversational follow-up edits to an already-running AI-built app, and moving capability enforcement from the userland AI client into a protected kernel-level core.
// run other people's software
Windows 3.1, DOS and DOOM.
A compatibility stack, built from scratch
MayteraOS includes an NE executable loader and a from-scratch Win16 translation layer that implements the classic KERNEL, USER and GDI APIs on its own kernel and compositor, plus a 16-bit OLE2/COM implementation for richer software. This is a compatibility capability, not bundled content: MayteraOS does not include or distribute third-party commercial software. You supply the program.
- Comprehensive KERNEL/USER/GDI/SHELL ordinal coverage, tested against a broad range of real Windows 3.1-era software supplied for testing: card games, puzzle games, a golf simulation, a full-featured word processor and other productivity and arcade titles
- 16-bit OLE2 / COM (storage engine, COM vtable dispatch)
- Windows 3.x-style
.SCRscreensaver hosting, alongside a native screensaver system - A DOS layer that runs a game two ways: the original in-kernel interpreter, and, more recently, an ordinary Ring-3 userland process selectable per install. Commander Keen, SimCity, Monkey Island (with working FM music, confirmed by a captured waveform on both execution paths), NetHack, SkyRoads, Stunts and The Incredible Machine all run. A per-window speed control and era-accurate CPU cycle caps, shipped for 18 titles, keep 1990s software from racing at today's clock speeds; mediated virtual CD volumes let multi-disc titles find their media with no physical drive involved.
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert reaches its VQA intro and in-game campaign, with a working sidebar, map scroll and unit selection. A keyboard-input defect surfaced on real hardware since; it was traced to a keyboard-driver install routine the game never reached, and fixed. The same class of gap in the newer Ring-3 host's mouse handling was found within days and a fix written, not yet re-verified on real hardware. Discworld II reaches its animated main menu; the game appears to freeze the instant New Game is clicked, but the engine keeps running underneath, blocked on a Miles digital-audio driver that would not install. That driver now installs and produces real, verified audio end to end; getting the level itself to load is the next piece of work. Bring your own copies; none are included or distributed with MayteraOS.
- id Software's own DOOM engine source on a native i_maytera platform layer (bring your own DOOM.WAD)
// the engineering underneath
Real systems, all hand-written.
[||] Real SMP
Brings up application processors through INIT/SIPI into long mode and schedules user applications across every core, not just the boot CPU: confirmed live with zero panics on real hardware (8 of 8 cores on a laptop, 4 of 4 on an iMac). It is on by default now, with a single whole-kernel lock being narrowed piece by piece: under the un-narrowed lock, adding cores made the desktop compositor slower, and a first narrowing pass fixed that, taking the compositor from 8 to 31 frames per second at four cores and input latency from 32.8 ms to 8.2 ms by moving one syscall out from under the lock. The lock is still held 72.6% of the time, down from 96.7%; narrowing the rest is ongoing.
{~} Networking & TLS
A from-scratch TCP/IP stack: ARP, IP, UDP, TCP, DHCP, DNS, with a TLS 1.2/1.3 client (real certificate chain and signature verification, not just parsing) and a real HTTP/2 browser (HPACK, flow control, ALPN).
[SEC] Hardened by construction
Position-independent executables and a whole-image W^X gate across every shipped binary, per-process address randomization and stack canaries seeded from the kernel's own CSPRNG, SMEP, and a syscall boundary where all 132 pointer-taking calls are validated at one chokepoint, enforced by a build-failing lint. Each claim is backed by evidence, not just a flag; see the hardening page for what is enforced, partial or still planned.
[☐] Windowed desktop
A userland compositor with draggable windows, translucent glass windows over an animated, window-reactive wallpaper, drop shadows, a taskbar, a YAML-driven tray menu, desktop widgets and a desktop pet, all in a CDE/Motif aesthetic. Alt+Tab cycles between open windows, and the terminal completes commands and paths on Tab.
[/] Filesystems & disks
A read/write ext2 driver as the root filesystem and FAT32 with VFAT long filenames for
the UEFI system partition, behind a unifying VFS. A graphical Disk Manager app partitions,
formats (FAT or ext2) and mounts volumes under /MNT.
[>_] SSH & shell
An SSH-2 client and server (curve25519, AES-GCM, RSA and public-key auth) and a real terminal shell with history, pipes and redirection, plus msh and mvi.
[T] Themes
Switchable themes, from a period-correct retro UNIX look to modern light and dark, applied live with beveled widgets and TrueType text throughout.
[☀] Desktop widgets
Analog and digital clocks, a month calendar, live weather, a per-core system monitor, sticky notes and a draggable sheep desktop pet with gravity.
[py] Python & tools
A MicroPython interpreter plus a CLI toolset (ls, cat, sed, grep, head, tail and more) on a
freestanding libc with pipes, signals and ptys. The shell tools now include a full
grep (a GNU grep port) and a sed backed by POSIX basic and extended
regular expressions (the musl regex engine), not just literal string matching.
[USB] USB, generically
Mass Storage, HID (keyboard and mouse) and Audio Class drivers built from real device descriptors, not per-device tables. MayteraOS can boot and run entirely from a USB stick, with no internal disk at all.
[♫] Real audio, real music
A generic USB Audio Class driver verified against two different external DACs, feeding a skinnable music player with playlists, album art, and a real-time audio-reactive visualizer.
A separate tray Sound panel carries a system-wide 5-band graphic equalizer. It was removed for a time after its faders were found to move without changing any sound; it is now back in its original design with real per-band fixed-point DSP behind every fader, measured so that boosting one band moves that band and leaves its neighbours within about a decibel, and a flat setting is bypassed rather than computed.
[⎙] Printing & file shares
Send documents and images to a real network printer over IPP, and browse and read/write SMB and NFS network shares directly from Files, the terminal, and other apps; Files auto-discovers shares on the LAN.
[⇩] Installer
A from-scratch graphical installer partitions a disk, writes a real GPT and EFI System Partition, and clones the live filesystem onto it, so MayteraOS can install itself. A first-boot setup wizard then walks a new install through creating the first admin account.
[GM] Games, including native 3D
DOOM, distributed through the App Store; the classic BSD Rogue; and Maytera Squadron, an original side-scrolling shooter built for the OS with hand-tuned parallax pixel art. AssaultCube and OpenArena, two open-source first-person shooters, have been ported onto MayteraOS's own OpenGL-style graphics stack with real 3D rendering, mouse look and gunfire, but are withheld from the current public repository and release pending an open-source license compliance pass on their bundled engine trees; see Licenses.
// the apps, up close
Built-in apps.
All captured from the running framebuffer in QEMU.