ai infrastructure · keisei os

KeiSei OS — a derivation-first operating system.

An experimental operating system written in MAX. Its memory and scheduling policies are derived from the same math the lab uses in its research — not hand-tuned heuristics, but mechanisms read out of theorems. Boots in QEMU today; production-minimal target is on the roadmap.

Why an OS

A research lab eventually wants to ask: if our math is right, what changes when the OS is built from it? KeiSei OS is that experiment. Page-replacement, scheduling, I/O ordering — all the places where a kernel makes a policy choice — are written as derivations from the lab's research, not as imported heuristics.

The honest goal is not to ship a desktop OS. It is to surface where derived policies beat tradition and where they do not. Both outcomes are valuable; both are reported.

What runs today

  • Boots cleanly in QEMU on ARM64.
  • EL1 kernel + EL0 userspace separation.
  • Process loader — reads /bin/hello from an ext2 disk and runs it in EL0.
  • Syscall surface for I/O and process exit.
  • ext2 read-write filesystem.

Honest results from the derived-policy experiments

A Kuramoto-style oscillator-coupled page-replacement policy outperformed the LRU baseline in its controlled benchmark. A separate cache-eviction policy derived from a different lab theorem under-performed LRU — twice. The lab reports both. Negative results are useful: they tell us which math actually carries the load and which does not.

Road to production-minimal

The remaining gates before this is a usable workstation OS are bounded: a text editor in userspace, persistent boot across power cycles, and a single-image build that can run on real hardware (not just QEMU). The plan is public on request.