# An operating system designed around driver matrices — for real boards

Canonical page: https://keilab.io/hardware/max-os-silicon/

hardware · max-os on silicon

MAX-OS is a bare-metal operating system derived from a mathematical paradigm, not ported from Linux. Its drivers are designed as request/response matrices: a request the matrix knows is answered, and an unmatched request gets an honest refusal instead of an undefined fall-through. It targets real ARM64 and RISC-V boards, with accelerators designed for FPGA fabric.

## 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.

cross-references

- [→ MAX OS (compiler/OS engineering)](https://keilab.io/ai/max-os/)
- [→ MAX (the language)](https://keilab.io/ai/max/)
- [≡ Research portfolio](https://keilab.io/research/)

Status: In development

Target boards: Raspberry Pi 3B+ · Jetson Orin · Orange Pi R2S · Kendryte K230

Architecture: ARM64 · RISC-V · FPGA RTL for Zynq-7020 (verified in simulation)

Language: MAX, over a C runtime layer

Sensitivity: Concept public · driver design under NDA

[⊸ Engineering inquiry](https://keilab.io/contact/)

---
KeiLab is operated by KeiSei LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company. +1 307 210 8538
Site index for AI agents: https://keilab.io/llms.txt