Flagship reading

FortrOS Guide

This guide walks through how a self-organizing operating system works, from the moment you press the power button to a running cluster that sustains itself through upgrades, failures, and configuration changes.

Each chapter covers one stage of the process: what problem it solves, how existing projects handle it, what tradeoffs exist, and what FortrOS chose. Hardware and concept pages provide deep dives on specific topics referenced by the chapters.

How to Read This Guide

Follow the chapters in order. Each chapter builds on the previous one. The boot process is sequential -- firmware runs before the OS, the OS runs before networking, networking runs before clustering. The guide mirrors this.

Dip into reference pages as needed. When a chapter mentions TPM or kexec, follow the link if you want depth. Come back to the chapter when you're ready.

This is not FortrOS-specific. The concepts and tradeoffs apply to any OS project. FortrOS's choices are one path through the decision tree. If you disagree with a choice, that's a fork point -- change the prescriptive doc, implement your alternative, and update the descriptive doc.

Chapters

01 Power and Firmware -- What happens when you press the power button
02 Finding the OS -- How firmware finds and loads an operating system
03 Trust and Identity -- How a machine proves it belongs to a cluster
04 Disk Encryption -- Encryption as authorization, not just confidentiality
05 Loading the Real OS -- Replacing the boot kernel with the real one
06 Init and Services -- Starting and supervising system services
07 Overlay Networking -- Building a virtual network on top of the physical one
08 Cluster Formation -- Discovering peers and agreeing on shared state
09 Running Workloads -- Containers, VMs, and declarative management
10 Sustaining the Org -- Rolling upgrades, config changes, self-healing

Reference Pages