The future we were promised took a wrong turn somewhere around 1992. We went back for it.
Plan 9 evolved for modern computing: a capability micro-kernel where every resource is a file server and every fast path is a shared-memory ring.
There was a moment when computing could have gone another way. Plan 9 made every resource a file and every machine part of one namespace. The Amiga ran a whole multitasking desktop out of a few hundred kilobytes. Micro-kernels promised systems small enough to understand and too modular to bring down.
Then the industry took the other road: bigger kernels, deeper stacks, layers wrapped round layers, and machines their owners can no longer read.
VectraOS rebuilds the clarity of those lost systems from the ground up for the hardware of now: many-core SoCs, unified memory, GPUs and NPUs, and a swarm of your own machines on the desk and in the rack.
The goal is a system one hacker can hold in their head. Any service explorable with
ls and cat. Any action a person can take, scriptable through the same interface.
Windows, sensors, accelerators, AI contexts, the network and the process table are all file trees.
Every service describes itself with .help and .schema files, so people, scripts
and agents discover it the same way.
Plan 9's terminal/CPU-server split, rebuilt for heterogeneous swarms. A laptop mounts a workstation's GPU or a server's NPU into its namespace and uses it as if it were local.
Address spaces, threads, capabilities, notification. Nothing else. Drivers, filesystems, the network stack and the window server are ordinary processes talking over lock-free rings.
No ambient authority. A process names only what it was given. Sandboxes, containers, agent permissions and remote sessions are one mechanism: a namespace built for the purpose.
Models are a system resource like storage or audio, served under /ai. Nothing leaves your
machine, or your own swarm, unless a policy says so.
One mechanism per job. No compatibility shims, no portability layers. The one exception is a POSIX personality, so LLVM, Python and Git come along without growing the kernel.
Under QEMU on x86_64 and aarch64, VectraOS boots through Limine into a capability micro-kernel, starts its
services, and drops you at gsh, a shell built on 9front's rc.
The network is a mount. The process table is a directory. A file server on another machine joins your namespace with one command.
# the network, Plan 9 style vx% cat /net/ipifc/0/status dev=ether0 addr=10.0.2.15/24 gw=10.0.2.2 dhcp lease=86400s # a 9P file server across TCP, into the namespace vx% mount tcp!10.0.2.100!5640 /n/host vx% ls /n/host hello.txt vx% cat /n/host/hello.txt hello from the host vx% echo hi > /n/host/out.txt vx% cat /n/host/out.txt hi
If the first-party base system cannot be understood by one person, it is too big.
— Design rule 13