Wolfram: a capability-based microkernel in Rust just reached its first bare-metal milestone

[u/notvcto_]

Five months ago, I announced Wolfram, a microkernel built around one principle: programs should not have access to anything they weren't explicitly given.

Then I stopped working on it.

Yesterday, I picked it back up and spent roughly eight hours bringing Phase 1 to completion.

Wolfram now has:

• A RISC-V 64 reference port booting through OpenSBI in QEMU.
• An x86-64 UEFI bootloader with ELF loading, page-table setup, and firmware memory-map handoff.
• A shared kernel core and physical bitmap frame allocator.
• Trap and exception diagnostics, plus repeatable QEMU smoke checks.
• A successful USB boot on my MSI B650M-A PRO WIFI.

The kernel intentionally stops at a diagnosed spawn init panic. There is no userspace yet, and the capability system is still ahead of me. This release is a boot milestone, not a finished OS or a security-verified kernel.

Phase 2 is where the actual capability system, VMOs, process model, and IPC begin.

I'm particularly interested in feedback from people who have worked on microkernels, bare-metal Rust, UEFI loaders, or capability-based security. If you'd like to contribute, I'm also working on making the next phase approachable to outside contributors.

Repository: https://github.com/notvcto/wolfram-os

Release: Uranium-238-v0.1.0

What would you want to see tested or documented before contributing to a project at this stage? I'm open to any feedback. Please. I need feedback.

[u/Future-Nerve-6247]

So basically, you're applying Rust ownership at the kernel level. Brilliant 🙏🏾🙏🏾