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THATTEOS — a balanced ternary operating system

CI License: AGPL v3

THATTEOS is a microkernel operating system written entirely in ManiT, the balanced ternary systems language. It manages a photonic-ternary computing fabric the way a conventional kernel manages a CPU — except the clock is a photon schedule, addresses are trits, and privilege is a single trit deep.

What's here, all in ManiT source:

  • Kernel (src/): bootstrap, interrupt dispatch, three-ring security (+1 kernel / 0 service / −1 user), scheduler, process management, trit-addressed virtual memory with trit-trie page tables, syscall dispatch, message-passing IPC, trit-stream channels, photon-schedule capability security, TTY driver
  • Interactive shell (thatteos.mt): builds and runs on Linux today (hosted mode) via the manitc LLVM backend
  • Userspace (userspace/): calculator, Fibonacci, file manager, text editor, web browser, SDL2 GUI apps, IPC/capability demos — all in ManiT
  • Tests (tests/): kernel + userspace regression suite

New here? Read GETTING_STARTED.md, then docs/ARCHITECTURE.md — the handbook of every kernel subsystem.

Quick start (hosted mode, Linux)

# 1. Build the compiler (sibling repo)
git clone https://github.com/manishthatte/manitc
cd manitc && cargo build --release && cd ..

# 2. Build and run the THATTEOS shell
git clone https://github.com/manishthatte/thatteos
cd thatteos && bash build.sh
./thatteos

# 3. Userspace programs
bash userspace/build.sh
./userspace/bin/calc

Requires clang-19 (or set CLANG), and optionally libcurl + SDL2/SDL2_ttf for the browser and GUI programs.

License

  • AGPL-3.0 (LICENSE) with the syscall boundary note: programs that run on THATTEOS via its syscalls/IPC are not captured by the kernel's license — write and distribute them under any terms.
  • Commercial licenses for proprietary kernel derivatives: manish@manitlab.org

Contributions require the one-line CLA — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Patents

The photonic-ternary hardware architecture THATTEOS manages is covered by twelve patent applications filed with the Indian Patent Office (2026), sole inventor Manish Jagdish Thatte — see NOTICE. The AGPL's patent grant (§11) applies to this software as released; hardware implementations require a separate license.


Authored by Manish Jagdish Thatte · manish@manitlab.org · manitlab.org

© Manish Jagdish Thatte, 2026

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A microkernel operating system written entirely in ManiT, the balanced ternary systems language. Trit-addressed memory with trit-trie page tables, three privilege rings one trit deep, photon-schedule capability security. Builds and runs on Linux today.

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