Project status · October 2026

Early development, moving steadily.

Rigelstra boots and runs today, in virtual environments and on bare-metal hardware. About seven of the ten planned development phases are complete.

Working today Done

Its own bootloader, for modern UEFI computers
Multi-core support
A transactional core that holds system state
Its own file system, on virtual, SATA and NVMe disks
Programs running in protected user mode, a command shell and around 100 utilities
Video output with its own console and font
Keyboard and mouse input
Network connectivity: IPv4, IPv6, DNS, TCP and a built-in firewall
User accounts, permissions and an audit log
Whole-disk encryption and a signed, tamper-evident boot
Memory hardening: randomised layouts, guard pages and stack protection
USB keyboards, mice and storage, and booting from a USB stick

In progress Now

Broader networking: more tools, more of IPv6, and more network cards
More security auditing and logging
Growing the library of built-in programs

Planned Next

Display detection and audio
A terminal desktop and a graphical desktop
An installer for ordinary computers
Packages and updates

How we test

Every change to Rigelstra runs through an automated test suite before it is accepted, covering the core, the file system, security features and deliberate crash scenarios. At the end of each major phase, Rigelstra is also checked on bare-metal hardware.

This page is updated as milestones are completed.