What is JouleOS

JouleOS is the operating system for all silicon. It is the reference implementation of the Unified Design Architecture (UDA): a single intent IR that is specialized at boot to the coordinate it finds itself on, so the same program runs as a native app, in a browser, and on bare metal — each lowered for where it actually is.

The thesis is simple and uncompromising: hardware, runtime, language, and surface are one co-designed artifact. We don’t own the silicon, so the runtime measures where it is and lowers accordingly against a control vector — address-space ownership, capability enforcement, persistence directness, dispatch reach.

The four load-bearing ideas

A single-level store — the in-memory bytes are the durable bytes. No serialize, no deserialize, no save. See Single-level store.
An energy-tiered cascade — every intent descends a cost-ordered ladder and stops at the cheapest family that can satisfy it; inference is the last resort. See The refine cascade.
A capability ledger — unforgeable by construction; eight typed classes gate every I/O path. See Capability ledger.
A measured energy oracle — real joules from the hardware, tagged with honest provenance. See Energy oracle.

Where it runs

Surface	Stack	Target
Native	winit + wgpu	host OS window
Browser	wasm + WebGPU/Canvas2D	a tab (the PWA)
Bare metal	no_std	`x86_64-unknown-none`

Conformance asserts AOT ≡ JIT, bit-for-bit across these. Continue to Quickstart, or read the UDA thesis.