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wiki/ hideOS wiki

$cat wiki/Home.md

hideOS wiki

hideOS is a Linux workstation operating system built from source and sealed: the system is one read-only image, checked by fs-verity through composefs, whose digest is carried on the command line of a signed kernel image. Updates replace the image whole, and an update that does not boot is rolled back by the boot manager. oxinit is PID 1 and COSMIC is the desktop.

This wiki is the working notes: how to build, test and reason about the tree as it is today. The design itself is specified in ARCHITECTURE.md, and what is done in ROADMAP.md; where the wiki and those disagree, they decide, and the wiki is wrong.

Status

Pre-alpha, and only in QEMU, on x86_64:

  • hideOS Minimal (a shell) and Workstation (the COSMIC desktop) build from source with hideforge, and boot sealed from a disk that hideOS’s own installer wrote.
  • The boot chain is UEFI, hideBoot, a signed UKI, hidestage, oxinit. Secure Boot is enforced with a development key.
  • Updates are OCI images. A good update boots and is marked good; one that cannot mount, panics or hangs is tried three times and then the previous system boots. A power cut after any of an update’s five steps leaves a system that boots.
  • The root can be LUKS2-encrypted, opened in hidestage by passphrase, recovery key, or a key sealed to the TPM.
  • Signed system extensions merge over /usr at boot.
  • A recovery system on the ESP chooses what boots next or opens a shell; the installer can reinstall keeping /home.
  • The Workstation has Flatpak with Flathub (its signed summary verified), the desktop portals, hideupd on the system bus, and a Settings → Updates page; its default theme is Dracula.
  • Updates come from a registry, on the edge, beta and stable channels.
  • Secure Boot with hideOS’s own keys, enrolled by the installer; hidelogin, in place of elogind, for sessions, seats and power.

Not yet: aarch64 images. The milestones are H0 to H8 in ROADMAP.md.

Pages

  • Building: the builder container, cargo xtask image, editions, where the outputs go.
  • Testing: every cargo xtask *-test, what it proves and what it needs.
  • Boot chain: from the firmware to oxinit, and what each step checks.
  • Updates and rollback: OCI images, boot counting, garbage collection, hideupd and os.hide.Update1.
  • Disk and encryption: partitions, subvolumes, LUKS2, the TPM, swap and hibernation.
  • Install and recover: the installer medium, reinstalling, the recovery system.
  • System extensions: what they are, how they are signed, hide ext.
  • Applications: Flatpak, Flathub, the portals.
  • hideforge: recipes, the sandbox, the bootstrap stages.
  • Development notes: lessons that were not obvious, one entry each.

Editing the wiki

The pages are Markdown in docs/wiki, one file per page, and change in the same commit as the work they describe. cargo xtask wiki renders them into site/wiki/, and cargo xtask publish-site does the same before it publishes. See docs/wiki/README.md for the conventions.