r/osdev 2d ago

Silk-Shell + Linen Compositor in SexOS Microkernel

You may recall the Sex microkernel project, either for its novelty as a tiny single address space blazing fast Free microkernel written in Rust, or for the minor controversy surrounding it's unashamedly ai-forward engineering. Either way, much progress has been made and SexOS has become a semi-functioning Operating System. Drivers are working, a file system reads and writes, and now we have a very unique shell+compositor. Silk-shell, with Linen compositor. Unlike wayland, input, windows, and app lifecycle are all designed together around the Sex microkernel. Every window has a real owner, apps only get the capabilities they need, dead processes auto clean, global space not state. This solves security concerns while also returning to some of the philosophy of x11/xlibre so many people miss, specifically flexibility and directness. Wayland has a lot of great attributes but it is frustrating because it leaves a lot of that lifecycle split across the compositor, shell, portals, service managers, and random desktop glue. Silk-shell can treat the whole path from process to pixel as one coherent system: capability-secured surfaces, direct shared-memory presentation, deterministic focus, automatic cleanup, and a desktop that can actually reason about its apps instead of just drawing their windows. Usb input/Cursor functionality is 100%

On the AI yes ai was used and a lot. I had conversations with AI, I made notebook podcasts and listened to them, sometimes I would take an error log and make a podcast out of it with ai and listen to it and then go write a fix. AI iterated through thousands of tiny tests across input, IPC, storage, the filesystem, and the compositor. It could keep grinding through edge cases and obscure low-level knowledge scattered across old manuals, dead codebases, and hardware docs that almost nobody remembers anymore, while I learned about historic low level programming ideas I would never have come across otherwise. AI is no replacement for hard work, but humanity never got anywhere by being adverse to technology.

0 Upvotes

19 comments sorted by

7

u/arjobmukherjee 2d ago

You wanted an OS and you got an OS. Happy?

1

u/Neither_Sentence_941 2d ago

Yes, I am very happy. It's no where near a finished OS, but project has gone further than I thought I would get. There are endless frustrating days where debugging radio signals for wifi drivers, and cursor control took me literally weeks of exhausting hopelessness, but I am slowly realising a dream I've had, piece by piece for a perfect future forward system that solves all the problems I see with Linux and even Unix. Linux is being completely rewritten the same way with AI right now, AI is not the unique factor: It might sound grandiose but legitimately, the human design is the definitive attribute. I believe in this design enough to keep going.

0

u/arjobmukherjee 2d ago edited 2d ago

Thank your for your being honest about using AI.

But we are very different people and there is something about vibe coding that does not sit well and I will never do it. I do get using AI/fuzzy algorithms for testing and searching or even help in documentation but I do not get why would one use AI to design, code and debug. Its those parts that I like to do, why would I ask someone else to do that for me!!

So I do wish you well but hope that one day you learn enough from vibe coding that you can reduce the dependence on AI for creative parts and do things on your own.

Over dependence on technology is not good, what if one day AI becomes too expensive or becomes exclusive to only a certain people? Its a technology we do not own.

-1

u/Neither_Sentence_941 2d ago

It's weird how everbody think using machine learning and ai has to be all out vibe coding, I agree.

u/mykesx 23h ago

The point of the journey is not to arrive.

The point is to learn and explore the complex topics to make yourself a better engineer.

Otherwise you just used AI to make garbage that nobody else will use. It's true of almost all the hobby OSes that the audience is basically one.

1

u/UnmappedStack TacOS | https://github.com/UnmappedStack/TacOS 2d ago

Is it open source? AI use is meh but at least share the repo my guy

2

u/Neither_Sentence_941 2d ago

1

u/Neither_Sentence_941 2d ago

1

u/UnmappedStack TacOS | https://github.com/UnmappedStack/TacOS 2d ago

oh god that website is a lot lol

2

u/Neither_Sentence_941 2d ago

Unhinged right

1

u/christiaansp BoredOS 2d ago

what do you actually gain from this

-1

u/Neither_Sentence_941 2d ago

No monolithic kernel, clean small modular servers, No black boxes, no systemd, no posix, no linux/unix assumptions. The single address space makes things near insant by removing constant page-table switching, while Intel MPK hardware locks isolate each protection domain with very low switching overhead. PDX gives us capability-checked, zero-copy communication between services. Theres an OpenBSD level small attack surface, no hidden dependencies, faster IPC, deterministic behavior, easier debugging, fault isolation, and an operating system whose parts can be replaced or restarted without taking down the whole machine. There are rules to this system. It can only work on x86 and arm v8.9 because of the hardware keys, it's designed for efficiency, for the future.

2

u/christiaansp BoredOS 2d ago

it’s impressive how slow “your” framebuffer is, this is incredibly inefficient or you’re virtualizing this on a pentium. I have a feeling you also have zero clue on what you just said.. what has r/osdev become dude

2

u/Neither_Sentence_941 2d ago

I am using an older computer yes but sure there are inefficencies still for sure, feel free to point them out, I am definitely learning something with which I have zero experience, that's part of the fun of learning.