// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
UnoDOS
One source tree, one design, twenty-two machines, from an IBM PC/XT with an
8088 to the modern laptop on your desk.
UnoDOS is a family of graphical operating systems. It began as a GUI-first,
16-bit real-mode OS written entirely in x86 assembly, fitting a kernel, a
window manager, two filesystems, cooperative multitasking and a full
application set on a single 1.44 MB floppy. It has since grown into a
contract-driven family of ports spanning home computers, consoles, handhelds,
single-board computers and a phone, and its flagship is now pc64: UnoDOS
running bare-metal on any modern 64-bit PC, on its own drivers, with its own
network stack, browser, office suite, compiler and hypervisor.
Prebuilt images for every platform are on the
releases page: a hybrid ISO and
USB disk image for modern PCs, cartridge ROMs for the consoles and handhelds,
disk images for the home computers, and SD-card payloads for the boards. Most
of them run in an emulator within a minute; the
user manual walks through booting real
hardware, including one-click USB flasher apps for Windows and macOS.
What has actually been verified is a separate question from what builds, and
PLATFORMS.md is the ledger that answers it: per platform, what
has booted on real hardware (and on which physical machine), what is
emulator-verified only, and every known gap.
pc64 boots bare-metal on essentially any x86-64 PC made since ~2007.
UEFI plays the role the BIOS plays for the classic OS: the firmware hands over
a framebuffer, a keyboard and the boot volume, and then, on most machines,
UnoDOS calls ExitBootServices and the firmware leaves. From that point
the OS runs entirely on its own drivers. A hybrid disk image boots the same OS
on legacy-BIOS machines too.
The shell is built on unoui, the family's cross-platform widget toolkit: a
windowed desktop with a taskbar, virtual desktops, window snapping, an
animated Alt-Tab switcher, desktop icons and a programs menu. Ten themes are
live-switchable, from Aurora (the modern flat default, in light and dark)
to faithful retro looks (Mac OS 7, 1-bit Mac Plus, Windows 3.1, Amiga
Workbench, C64, Apple II, NeXTSTEP). Text is kerned, anti-aliased TrueType
with bundled open fonts, and every control is reachable by pointer or
keyboard.
Apps are loadable .UNO modules carrying their own descriptors: drop one
into APPS\ and the shell discovers it. No rebuild, no reboot.
Everything below the firmware line is native, written for this tree:
unovirt enters VMX operation on Intel hardware and runs
guests behind EPT with virtio devices: a real Ubuntu kernel boots under
UnoDOS, reaches userspace, answers at its shell, and mounts an ext4 disk
served from a file on a UnoDOS volume. The Appliances app and VM manager
front it; an AMD/SVM backend is written and awaiting hardware proof.
Validated on a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8 (native trackpad, Wi-Fi, live
theme and resolution switching), on an always-on ZimaBlade test box (boots
from USB, detaches from the firmware, runs fully native), and on QEMU+OVMF
harnesses that boot the real image on every change. The design notes in
pc64/README.md record the firmware traps only real hardware
exposes; they are half the value of the port.