FAQ: Architecture, Availability & Philosophy

xHunOS (玄魂) is an independent, roughly 25MB bare-metal operating system for contemplation and metaphysical computation. It runs at processor Ring 0 with a single address space, a native 16-bit UCS-2 Chinese lexer, the DaoFS filesystem and the xLang/ZAsm toolchain.

Yes. It is a research OS with a kernel, filesystem, compiler, window manager and application suite. The kernel is in active development at v0.2; the standalone image is not publicly released yet.

It continues TempleOS's architectural lineage: Ring-0 execution, no paging, no network stack and a shell-native compiler. It is not an official TempleOS distribution; the language, character set, filesystem and cosmological model are new.

Systems programmers, digital minimalists, contemplative practitioners and anyone who wants a small, legible, offline machine rather than another general-purpose computer.

Because isolation is not a goal of the design. With one owner, no network and no untrusted processes, the kernel can give every task full access and spend its complexity budget on determinism instead of protection boundaries.

Paging adds page-table walks, TLB maintenance and page-fault jitter. xHunOS maps physical RAM 1:1 and disables the paging unit, trading multi-tenant isolation for predictable timing.

The kernel has no TCP/IP stack. There is no browser, no cloud sync and no telemetry channel. Any data movement is deliberate and local rather than a background service.

DaoFS is the xHunOS filesystem. Files occupy contiguous 2048-byte sectors with no inode tree and no seek penalty, matching the geometry of raw SPI flash.

DolDoc is a hypertext document format where text, code, links and interactive elements share one file. Documentation can execute examples and link straight to kernel source.

xLang is the system language: a HolyC descendant with Chinese keywords and native 16-bit UCS-2 tokenization. Source is compiled in memory to x86-64 machine code in under a millisecond.

ZAsm is the 64-bit assembly layer. It aliases general-purpose registers to the Heavenly Stems and condition flags to the Eight Trigrams.

No. There is no ELF/PE loader and no Linux ABI. Applications are written in xLang and compiled by the system itself.

Not yet. The kernel is at v0.2 and no public ISO has been released. The download page tracks what the first public build will contain.

The target is x86-64 bare metal with a 640×480 framebuffer and raw SPI flash storage. The Tianming Box is the first planned deployment.

The Tianming Box (天命盒), also branded as the YuanYu Destiny Box, is a wooden, air-gapped portable device designed to run xHunOS for hardware-entropy divination.

Release status and architecture notes are published on this site. The whitepaper and the xLang specification are the authoritative technical references.