// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Systemd Creator’s Startup Opens Signups for Private Preview of its Linux System
Before announcing this Linux-based implementation, Amutable had released two open source tools. tine, a Buck2-based build system that composes OS images; available under MPL-2.0, and Quarry, a TUF-based tool that distributes those images to machines; available under Apache-2.0.
What Amutable Foundations brings to the table is a service where Amutable runs the images, update repositories, control plane and vulnerability fixes for organizations and individuals who operate their own systems.
No license has been stated for those company-run parts, and the preview announcement does not say how much of Foundations beyond tine and Quarry will be open source.
Foundations is the product of Amutable, the startup Lennart Poettering co-founded earlier this year with Christian Brauner and Chris Kühl.
The system is immutable, with read-only system volumes protected by dm-verity, signed unified kernel images, and measured boot. Software and configuration both ship as signed images, and a machine boots only what is signed.
Because there is no package manager and no SSH or interactive shell, a change means giving every machine in your fleet a new signed image.
Its images are reproducible, come with an SBOM and are built from pinned inputs of whichever distribution you pick, with tine being able to import packages from Fedora or CentOS Stream.
Each machine sends a signed report that records what it booted, from the firmware and boot loader up to the kernel and OS, plus the configuration it runs.
Reports go out at regular intervals and at boot, and the signature is backed by a TPM or a CPU with confidential computing support. Machines without that hardware can fall back to a software key.
Amutable's control plane verifies reports from systemd-report, an experimental command in systemd 260 that the company helped build. It compares each one with the declared state and flags machines that deviate.