Microkernel · self-healing · x86-64
The system that stays up when a piece goes down.
Ixolo is a Unix-like operating system built on a microkernel. Drivers and services live in isolation and, if one fails, it restarts on its own without taking the rest down. Like the axolotl, it regenerates.
amd64 · UEFI and BIOS · SMP · BSD-style licence
Illustrative demo: a network driver dies and comes back
# kill -9 $(pidof igc) rs: e1000_0 exited unexpectedly rs: restarting e1000_0… done # ping -c 1 10.0.2.2 1 packets transmitted, 1 received
Why Ixolo
Reliable by design, not by luck.
Heals itself
Drivers and servers run as isolated user-space processes. The Reincarnation Server notices a failure and brings the component back, live.
A kernel you can read
About 15 000 lines of C and assembly, amd64 included. Small enough to audit, teach and reason about end to end.
Today's hardware
x86-64 with SMP up to 32 CPUs, UEFI boot, a 128 TB address space, NVMe with MSI-X, USB 2.0 and 3.0 storage and 2.5 GbE Ethernet.
Your data, safe
Metadata journaling in MFS v4: after a hard power-off, the file system recovers when mounted, without a full fsck.
Real POSIX
Threads with real-time scheduling and priority inheritance, real-time signals, message queues, semaphores, asynchronous I/O, kqueue and job control. 1645 of 1757 Open POSIX tests pass.
Hardened and tested
NX, SMEP and SMAP, stack protector, FORTIFY and ASLR in user space. Every change boots in QEMU on one and two CPUs and must pass the test suites and pjdfstest.
Architecture
Designed like an organism.
Every component lives in its own cell. If a driver or a server fails, the microkernel keeps running and the Reincarnation Server brings it back up. The failure stays in one piece, not the whole system.
How it works inside →- 4User programsShells, editors, network services, desktop
- 3System serversVFS · process manager · memory manager · Reincarnation Server
- 2DriversDisk, network, USB… each in its own process
- 1MicrokernelInterrupts, scheduling and message passing
Who it is for
One system, four ways to use it.
Servers
Services that survive driver failures without rebooting the machine. For places where every outage counts.
Education
A real, small, documented system for teaching operating systems with code you can read in full.
OS developers
A modern microkernel lab: SMP, UEFI, CI with QEMU and a design document for each subsystem.
Desktop
Our own Wayland compositor with LXQt and Qt 6. It works, but it is still experimental.
Try it in a virtual machine
Download the ISO and boot it in QEMU. A few minutes later you are at the login prompt.
qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -cpu host -m 2G -smp 2 \ -cdrom ixolo-[VERSION]-amd64.iso
[DATE] · stable release
Ixolo [VERSION]
- SMP on amd64, with real-time scheduling
- Metadata journaling in MFS v4
- UEFI boot, NVMe and USB storage
- A hardened user space and OpenSSH {openssh}
- Wayland desktop with LXQt (experimental)
Meet Xolo
An axolotl that never gives up.
The axolotl regrows legs, gills and even parts of its heart. That is why Ixolo carries its name and Xolo is its mascot. Its story comes from Mexica mythology.
Why we are called this →