Driver-as-matrix
A conventional OS driver is a hand-written C state machine per device. In MAX-OS a driver is designed as a matrix instead: a request the matrix knows is answered, and a request it does not know is refused rather than guessed. The aim is one driver design carried from board to board. The design detail is shared with partners under NDA.
Board targets
- Raspberry Pi 3B+ — USB keyboard and mouse, wired networking and Bluetooth LE, with no Linux driver in the loop.
- Jetson Orin — a bare-metal kernel with direct access to the GPU and its display coprocessor, aimed at GPU compute without Linux.
- Orange Pi R2S — the RISC-V target (SpacemiT K1), built from the same MAX source as the ARM64 boards.
- Kendryte K230 — a dual-core RISC-V wearable board, the target for a wearable mobile AI cortex.
FPGA fabric — Zynq-7020
For the programmable-logic fabric of a Xilinx Zynq-7020, the lab has written hardware circuits in Verilog — SHA-256, Poly1305 and ChaCha20 engines, a scene-compositor framebuffer blitter and an AXI-Lite accelerator interface. Each is verified in Verilator simulation against a golden-vector testbench, byte-identical to its MAX/C software counterpart.
A MAX matrix multiply on the Orin GPU
In our tests, a matrix multiply written in MAX — compiled by MAX to CUDA C and built with NVIDIA's nvcc — matched a CPU reference bit-exactly on a Jetson Orin GPU under Linux (max |GPU − CPU| = 0). No cuBLAS or cuDNN is involved; NVIDIA's compiler, the CUDA runtime and the Linux GPU driver are.
Why it matters
Most operating systems are millions of lines of hand-written C, ported and patched over decades. MAX-OS is derived fresh from a mathematical paradigm — one language and one driver design, carried from board to board instead of rewritten from scratch for each.
