Making humble hardware scream.

violetOS is an operating system built from first principles in Zig, establishing a new architecture distinct from UNIX and POSIX conventions. It features a vector-asynchronous and polymorphic kernel designed for atomic modularity and fearless concurrency.

The project aims to eliminate system unpredictability by prioritizing isolation and explicit dependency management. Instead of optimizing for speed through complex heuristics, violetOS seeks performance through architectural simplicity, interface-driven polymorphism, and zero-copy mechanisms.

It isn't an imitation of the past; it is a robust, lightweight, and unapologetically forward-looking platform designed to define what a secure, high-performance operating system can be in the modern era.

violetOS decouples software architecture from execution strategy. Logically, it enforces a strict microkernel design: the core is hollow, containing only the scheduler and IPC, while drivers and services remain distinct modules interacting through explicit interfaces. This guarantees modularity and prevents the tight coupling typical of traditional monolithic kernels.

Physically, however, the runtime adapts to the context. While untrusted processes remain strictly isolated, trusted modules share the kernel's address space. This hybrid approach preserves the architectural cleanliness of a microkernel while reclaiming the raw performance of a monolith—enabling direct function calls and zero-copy mechanisms—precisely where they are needed.

This project uses and is tested with Zig 0.14.1. We recommend using zvm to install and manage Zig versions.

To run a virtual instance of violet on your computer, you will also need QEMU.

Thanks to Zig, building and running an operating system has never been so easy. Ensure you're using a compatible Zig version, then simply type:

zig build -Dplatform={IDENTIFIER}

Default to aarch64_qemu (see Platform matrix for more details).

It is as simple as building violetOS:

zig build run -Dplatform={IDENTIFIER}

¹ ✅ means "Supported".

² 🔨 means "Partially supported / Unstable (WIP)".

³ 🗓️ means "Planned".

⁴ Raspberry Pi 4B, 400 and 4 CM.

⁵ Raspberry Pi 3B, 3B+ and 3 CM.

Distributed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE and NOTICE for more information.