Asterhold

PROJECT ATLAS   /   ROADMAP

The road to v1.

From the first boot handoff to a protected, interactive VM. The record below separates demonstrated behavior from design proposals and future release objectives.

CHAPTER 01   /   MISSIONS 001–006

Founding & first boot

Completed milestone record
  1. M001

    Founding the Kingdom

    Set the Constitution, subsystem boundaries and engineering lesson format.

  2. M001.5

    Asterhold takes its name

    Renamed the project while retaining its architectural vocabulary.

  3. M002

    The First Awakening

    A UEFI loader hands control to the original Rust kernel in QEMU.

  4. M003

    The Crown’s Watch

    Kernel-owned exception entry identifies a deliberate invalid instruction and halts safely.

  5. M004

    Guarded Ground

    Guarded stacks, read-only code, non-executable writable pages and page-fault diagnostics.

  6. M005

    The Memory Ledger

    The kernel inventories the physical memory map and explains which regions are reserved.

  7. M006

    The Royal Land Registry

    A bounded frame allocator tracks eligible 4 KiB frames separately from reserved memory.

CHAPTER 02   /   MISSIONS 007–012

Tasks, time & conversation

Completed milestone record
  1. M007

    The First Warriors

    Two cooperative kernel tasks keep their own guarded stacks and saved registers.

  2. M008

    The Kingdom’s Heartbeat

    A hardware timer delivers and acknowledges interrupts on one CPU.

  3. M009

    The Crown’s Summons

    The timer requests a scheduling decision; ordinary kernel code consumes it at a safe point.

  4. M010

    Opening the First Court

    Real serial input reaches a fixed-size editor, parser and read-only development console.

  5. M011

    The First Inhabitant

    A Ring 3 Rust program makes a checked kernel request; a user fault can be contained.

  6. M012

    The Court of the Overworld

    Court’s command engine moves to Ring 3 and uses bounded serial and status requests.

CHAPTER 03   /   MISSIONS 013–018.5

Lifetimes & authority

Completed milestone record
  1. M013

    The Changing of the Guard

    Terminate a protected context, revoke access, clear its private state and reuse the slot.

  2. M014

    The Crown’s Intervention

    A genuine timer budget stops a non-cooperating user program and returns control to a fresh Court.

  3. M015

    Reclaiming the Land

    Each supported app gets a private page-table root; owned frames are cleared and reclaimed.

  4. M016

    The Kingdom’s Guildhall

    Court requests approved catalog apps. The Crown chooses the image and limits.

  5. M017

    The Crown’s Grants

    Temporary service grants belong to a specific app instance and can be revoked.

  6. M018

    The Kingdom’s Living Workforce

    Two protected contexts retain independent address spaces and switch cooperatively.

  7. M018.5

    Open the Gates

    A disposable VM launcher connects the operator’s terminal directly to Court.

CHAPTER 04   /   MISSIONS 019–024

Sharing a processor

Completed milestone record
  1. M019

    The Second Intervention

    A timed user context can be canceled without destroying its suspended peer.

  2. M020

    A Fair Turn

    Two protected contexts take timer-driven turns under finite execution budgets.

  3. M021

    The Steward’s Cleanup

    Dedicated guarded kernel-entry stacks replace borrowed Warrior stacks; ownership is checked at teardown.

  4. M022

    Open Court

    A bounded Court generation can renew after verified cleanup and accounting.

  5. M023

    The Busy Kingdom

    Court stays responsive beside one running application and can inspect or stop its generation.

  6. M024

    The Watchful Steward

    A boot-scoped supervisor can retry a service within a finite allowance after cleanup.

CHAPTER 05   /   MISSIONS 025–028

A qualified VM candidate

Completed milestone record
  1. M025

    The Guildhall Workshop

    Separate approved Rust program images use the existing lifecycle and memory checks.

  2. M026

    The Long Watch

    Repeated VM workloads exercise scheduling, reclamation and continued serial interaction.

  3. M027

    The Earl’s Charter

    Documented alternatives for identities, Realms, grants and migration. The proposal is complete; those mechanisms are not implemented.

  4. M028

    VM development candidate

    Integrated the workshop profile, documented a hands-on tour and compared fourteen build products across fresh builds.

FIELD UPDATE   /   MAINTENANCE

After Mission 028

Fixed a host-side Git check on Windows-mounted WSL checkouts. On the measured workstation the clean launcher reached Court in about six seconds. A bounded clear command now clears the terminal while preserving a running app.

The maintenance baseline passed 145 real QEMU regressions and five interactive launcher sessions. These are historical qualification results, not a production reliability guarantee.

NEXT   /   DEPENDENCIES

Beyond the candidate

The provisional release objectives are a usable Court and initial Earl/Realm model at v0.1; persistent files, identities and basic networking at v0.5; and a VM-first service host with a founder-approved RatDB workload at v1. None is a promised shipment date.

  • In progress

    Learning materials

    Mission lessons and a VM tour exist. Expand the public field guide as new mechanisms become testable.

  • Planned

    Useful application capacity

    Move beyond two fixed contexts and tiny approved images; qualify private work memory, scheduling and cleanup before admitting larger applications.

  • Founder review needed

    Earl identities & private Realms

    Choose enrollment, recovery, session ownership and administrator visibility before representing anyone’s private belongings.

  • Founder review needed

    Scoped capabilities

    Extend the provisional grants only after defining issuers, resource scope, expiry and revocation, including in-flight work.

  • Founder review needed

    Filesystem & naming

    Separate names from access rights and choose crash and durability guarantees. The navigable namespace is a proposal.

  • Planned

    Native persistent storage

    After design approval, implement bounded device I/O, durable personal and service files, and recovery after interrupted writes.

  • Founder review needed

    Roads & Parley

    Define native network paths and authority for external communication. A connection must not by itself grant access.

  • Planned

    VM-first v1

    Deploy, inspect and recover useful apps and services through authenticated Court; serve files and websites with scoped access.

  • Founder review needed

    RatDB integration

    Agree on the first database workload and service boundary, then qualify it on native storage and networking.

  • Deferred

    Beyond the VM

    Consider physical hardware, more devices and broader deployment after the VM foundation is dependable. No hardware release date is set.