RigelstraA clean slate for privacy and stability.
Most operating systems grew over decades and carry that history with them. Rigelstra starts over, with privacy and stability as the foundation rather than features added later.
Coded completely from scratch
Every part of Rigelstra — its bootloader, kernel, file system, cryptography and programs — is written by us. We don’t vendor, fetch or link code from other projects into the operating system.
- Nothing hidden. There is no inherited code nobody fully understands, and no bundled library whose behaviour we can’t explain.
- A smaller attack surface. Less code, written with a single set of rules, means fewer places for flaws to hide.
- Independence. No upstream project can change direction, collect data or introduce a flaw on our behalf.
The trade-off is real: building everything ourselves takes time, and Rigelstra is early. We think the foundation is worth it.
Privacy by design
Rigelstra is not a general-purpose system with a privacy mode bolted on. It is built so there is nothing to opt out of.
- No telemetry, no tracking. Nothing in Rigelstra collects usage data or reports back to us or anyone else. There are no vendor accounts.
- Whole-disk encryption. Built in, using modern standard algorithms (AES-256 for the disk, Argon2id for passwords) and unlocked at boot. The cryptography is written from scratch, like everything else.
- Deny by default. The firewall blocks incoming connections unless a rule allows them, and every rule change is recorded.
- Accountable administration. Raising your privileges needs your password again, and important security events go to an audit log you can read.
- Tamper-evident boot. The bootloader checks a digital signature on the kernel and refuses to start one that has been altered.
Built for stability
A stable system is one that behaves predictably and fails safely. Rigelstra is designed and tested with that in mind.
- All-or-nothing changes. The core of Rigelstra keeps system state in a transactional store, with the same kind of guarantees a reliable database gives. A change completes fully or not at all, and the state can be rolled back to investigate a fault.
- Tested relentlessly. Every change must pass an automated test suite before it is accepted. That suite includes tests that deliberately crash the kernel to confirm it fails safely.
- Hardened memory. Randomised memory layouts, guard pages and stack protection make whole classes of bugs far harder to turn into failures or attacks.
- Boots on real hardware. Rigelstra has booted both in virtual environments and on bare-metal hardware.
What Rigelstra can do today
Rigelstra is early, and it is already a working system.
- Boots on modern UEFI computers through its own bootloader, in virtual environments and on bare-metal hardware.
- Video output with its own console and font, plus keyboard and mouse input, including USB.
- Network connectivity over IPv4 and IPv6, with address assignment, name lookup, TCP connections and a built-in firewall.
- Storage on SATA, NVMe and USB drives, with its own file system, and booting from a USB stick.
- Runs programs in protected user mode, with a command shell, around 100 utilities, user accounts and permissions.
Where it is heading
- Display detection and audio
- A terminal desktop and a graphical desktop
- An installer for ordinary computers
- Packages and updates