About
Who builds it, under what terms, and on whose shoulders.
The mission
Open Cube OS is written from scratch - not a Linux fork, not a distro - to answer one question: how small can a complete, trustworthy, recovery-first x86_64 system be, and still boot your real machine?
Every line is original C in this repository: 130,572 lines across 379 files, 251 commands, 17 services / 158 L1SVC ops, 54 syscalls. No external runtime is linked into the kernel.
License
The whole tree is Apache License 2.0 - the full text is in the repository root, and every source file carries an SPDX-License-Identifier header.
You may use, modify and distribute it commercially; the NOTICE file and per-file headers are the only attribution requirements.
Contributors
The project is built and maintained by cubestudio-dev. Contributions are welcome - the tree is strict about honesty: no stubs, no fake data, every claim in the docs is verifiable from the code (and the CI re-verifies it on every push).
How to contribute: the contributing guide covers style, the SPDX header rule, the 28-test regression gate and the release checklist.
Contact
Mail: cubestudio@qq.com
Bugs and features: the GitHub issue tracker. Security-sensitive reports: mail first, please.
Acknowledgements
The kernel is from scratch, but the boot chain and the toolbelt stand on mature open source:
- GRUB 2.12 - the hybrid BIOS + UEFI boot loader
- QEMU 10.0 and OVMF (edk2) - the bring-up and CI farm
- NASM, xorriso, mtools - build toolchain
- GCC 14 freestanding - the compiler the kernel targets
- Python (paramiko, pexpect) - the E2E test suites
- VitePress - the documentation center you are reading