rajamesandClaude Opus 5.5
c95191736e
Each board has one serial line that is its console, the lowest common denominator beside the screen and keyboard. Its address was QEMU's, fixed: on a Raspberry Pi 5 the aarch64 one is ordinary RAM, written to with every character printed; on a Milk-V Mars the riscv64 one is the board's UART with registers four bytes apart, and the UEFI loader would have waited for ever on its first character; on a PC with no COM1 the prompt read 0xFF for ever. console_attach_serial(), called before anything prints: COM1 if a UART answers there; elsewhere the UART that /chosen/stdout-path names (fdt_uart.c: alias, path, the address carried up through each bus's ranges, reg-shift and reg-io-width); with no devicetree, QEMU's. A devicetree that names no usable console gives no line, not a guess. A line that does not come ready is given up, not waited on. The riscv64 loader's early serial does the same. tools/fdt_uart_test.c, run by hand, 19 checks plain and under the sanitizers: devicetrees shaped like the Mars's, the Pi 5's and QEMU's, what must find nothing, and a block cut short at every length; and the Pi 5's real devicetree gives a PL011 at 0x107d001000. Acceptance, one QEMU at a time: v3 on amd64 (logs/20261013-204436), aarch64 (-204803) and riscv64 (-205001) to the zuse prompt, no unknown word, hash 0x08873e0f44b7cb2a on all three as before. -204600 is an aarch64 run during which the disk images were restored under it by a script that had been refused a second QEMU; it passed and is kept, and was run again. v4 on the three ISAs (-211149, -211444, -211857): POST 538 of 538, dict_hash 0xe5a57f3eb72ff94a, the typed session unchanged. The Mars image through OpenSBI and U-Boot in QEMU took its line and its interrupt controller from the devicetree and passed POST. Found on the way and not mended (boards/BRINGUP.md 1.6): built with EMERGENCY_CONSOLE_ENABLED=1 the prompt floods with empty lines. -210442 shows it; the commit before this does the same. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
LithosAnanke v2.0.1
UEFI-bootable FORTH microkernel. Boots from firmware, initialises memory and interrupts, then runs the StarForth VM as its sole userspace runtime. No libc. No OS. Just stone and necessity.
Lithos (foundation) + Ananke (necessity) — the kernel under StarshipOS.
Products
StarForth v4 moves the engine onto a 32-instruction core derived from Chuck Moore's F18
(docs/v4.0.0/). With it, this repository carries three products, not one:
| Product | What it is |
|---|---|
| Hosted StarForth F18 | The v4 engine as a native Linux build, for amd64, arm64 and riscv64, on real hardware. |
| FPGA StarForth F18 | A 32-bit build of the same engine loaded into the FPGA. It is the gateway to the rest: the foundation everything else is built up from. |
| StarshipOS | The bare-metal product: LithosAnanke running the v4 F18 engine. |
FORTH-79 is recomposed on the F18 engine and stored as a capsule; the StarshipOS-specific vocabulary gets the same treatment. The source tree will be reorganised around this split.
v3 remains the reference system until v4 meets its acceptance criteria
(docs/v4.0.0/JUSTIFICATION.md §16). Everything below describes v3 as it stands today.
Status — M7.1 (Capsule System · Multi-VM Fleet)
| Milestone | Status | |
|---|---|---|
| M0–M6 | UEFI boot · PMM · VMM · IDT · APIC · heap · framebuffer VT100 console (v1.5.1-FINAL) | ✅ Complete |
| M7 | StarForth VM integration + parity validation | ✅ Complete |
| M7.1 | Capsule birth protocol · Mama FORTH vocabulary · Tripod multi-VM fleet (Hermes/Artemis) · Word-level ACL (Phases 1–7) | 🔄 In Progress |
| M8 | REPL — keyboard input, interactive Forth | Planned |
| M9 | Block storage — AHCI driver | Planned |
POST at boot: parity hash verified across amd64/aarch64/riscv64 · Mama capsule dictionary: 453 words
What's live in M7.1
- Tripod — a named multi-VM fleet (Hera the Mama VM, Artemis, two Hermes instances) births, runs, and re-births independently, verified booting live pre-REPL on all three architectures.
- Hermes — a 17-block inter-VM messaging/channel layer between fleet members, with async delivery and channel negotiation.
- Artemis — a Block Allocation Map (BAM) storage subsystem with Q48.16
block-heat tracking and cooldown/reclamation (
ART-COOL/ART-REAP). - Word-level ACL — every dictionary entry carries a TTL/allow/mode/pin
access-control record. Strict, TTL, and pinned modes; two console layers
(emergency
ok>and superuserzuse)ok>). Phases 1–7 complete (C infrastructure, FORTH policy layer,zusebootstrap superuser, Isabelle proof stubs, kernel parity); Phase 8 (Ed25519 PKI / thumbdrive challenge-response) is the only item remaining. Measured overhead once active on every check: +0.0054%–+0.0088%, CV = 0.000%, across a 3×3 Latin-square DoE campaign (architecture × seed × 30 replicates) — three orders of magnitude below the measurement floor. - VM Fleet Attractor physics — the L8 Jacquard mode selector now has a real per-VM heat channel into fleet-wide tuning, replacing hardcoded compudynamics constants with a dynamically-inferred rate.
- Kconfig build configuration — every physics/heartbeat/pipelining/ kernel-only tuning knob (~40 total) is now a discoverable, optional Kconfig symbol shared with the hosted VM build. See Quick Start below.
Quick Start
# One boot image per physical target (output: build/boards/<board>/)
make boot_image TARGET=SER5 # Beelink SER5 -- GPT/ESP, BOOTX64.EFI
make boot_image TARGET=RASPI # Raspberry Pi 5 -- FAT, config.txt + kernel_2712.img + DTB
make boot_image TARGET=MILKV # Milk-V Mars -- GPT/ESP, BOOTRISCV64.EFI (U-Boot bootefi)
make boot_image TARGET=ZYNQ7020 # Zynq-7020 -- ARMv7 port in progress
make boards # list boards
# The same TARGET drives all, docs and clean (make help)
make # every board with a kernel port + hosted v3 + the book
make TARGET=RASPI # one board's image + build/docs/LithosAnanke-raspi.pdf
make docs # build/docs/LithosAnanke.pdf (LaTeX master: docs/book/main.tex)
make clean TARGET=RASPI # that board's outputs and build/aarch64/kernel
make clean # all of build/ except build/cache/
# Build kernel (requires cross-compilation toolchain, or native gcc)
make -f kernel/Makefile ARCH=amd64
# Run in QEMU with OVMF
make -f kernel/Makefile qemu
# Other architectures
make -f kernel/Makefile ARCH=aarch64 qemu
make -f kernel/Makefile ARCH=riscv64 qemu
Artifacts: build/amd64/kernel/starkernel_loader.efi · build/amd64/kernel/starkernel_kernel.elf
Tree: kernel/ (LithosAnanke: Makefile, src/, include/starkernel/, linker/),
v3/ (StarForth v3 engine and hosted build: Makefile, src/, include/),
v4/ (StarForth v4, see docs/v4.0.0/), boards/<board>/ (board.mk + boot files).
Every makefile runs from the repo root; the root Makefile forwards any other goal to
v3/Makefile (hosted build).
For the hosted VM by itself (Linux, no cross-compiler needed, no bare-metal tooling): see
the separate StarForth repository — LithosAnanke used to be a branch inside that repo,
now it's its own project with its own master.
Build configuration (optional)
Every kernel-only knob (STARFORTH_ENABLE_VM, PARITY_MODE, the shared
physics/heartbeat family, etc.) is an optional Kconfig symbol — a plain
make -f kernel/Makefile uses the same defaults it always has unless
you opt in:
make -f kernel/Makefile ARCH=amd64 menuconfig
make -f kernel/Makefile ARCH=amd64 kernel_amd64_defconfig
Documentation
| System Architecture | Full kernel + VM design |
| HAL Reference | Hardware abstraction layer interfaces |
| Capsule System — M7.1 | Capsule birth protocol design |
| VM Fleet Attractor design log | Tripod/Hermes/Artemis physics + build-system history |
| Getting Started / Kconfig reference | Full symbol reference for both build targets |
| Changelog | Milestone-level history |
| Roadmap | Milestone plan through self-hosting |
License
Starship License 1.0 (SL-1.0) — free for personal, research, and educational use. Commercial use requires a separate agreement. Attribution to R.A. James (Captain Bob) must be preserved in all distributions.
Patent pending. USPTO provisional filed December 2025 — physics-grounded self-adaptive runtime system. This license does not grant patent rights. Licensing inquiries: rajames440@gmail.com
Robert A. James (Captain Bob) · Systems Engineer · Hacking since 1973