MAX OS — a derivation-first operating system.

A research lab eventually wants to ask: if our math is right, what changes when the OS is built from it? MAX OS is that experiment. At the places where a kernel makes a policy choice — page replacement, scheduling, file-system layout, cache eviction — it tries policies derived from the lab's research against the classical designs.

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.

• An ARM64 kernel with QEMU as its engineering harness.
• 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.

The same design targets real boards under the MAX-OS silicon track — Raspberry Pi 3B+, Jetson Orin, Orange Pi R2S and Kendryte K230 — with crypto and compositor accelerators for a Zynq-7020 FPGA verified in simulation. The QEMU build above is the engineering harness; the hardware page has the boards.

The design goal is a minimal workstation OS, which includes a text editor in userspace and persistent boot across power cycles. The plan is available on request.