Roadmap

These milestones are the project's best guess, not a contract. Dates slip, priorities shift, and contributors change what's possible. If you want a milestone to land sooner, the answer is almost always "help".

Q2 2026 — Bootstrap

The goal this quarter is to turn darwinOS from a domain name into a working project.

  • Website live — *Done.* This page, Get Started, Architecture, Contribute, Status. Continued copy polish expected.
  • Community bootstrap — *In progress.* Chat channel, weekly office hours, first RFC drop.
  • Reference XNU build on Linux — *In progress.* A single command that produces a bootable kernel image.
  • First external contributors — *In progress.* Get ten people past their first merged patch.

Q3 2026 — First image

First bootable darwinOS image. Not useful yet, but real.

  • Reproducible QEMU image that boots to a shell on arm64 and x86_64
  • launchd as PID 1 with a handful of real services
  • Basic virtio driver set (net, block, console)
  • CI that builds and boots the image on every PR
  • Nightly snapshot downloads

Q4 2026 — Userland

A usable userland. "Usable" = you can SSH in and get work done, not "usable" as a daily driver.

  • A shell, coreutils, and the common text-processing tools
  • A working package story: install, uninstall, upgrade
  • Editor support: vi, nano, one modern TUI editor
  • dyld shared cache generation on target
  • libdispatch re-enabled and tested

Q1 2027 — First hardware

First port to real hardware. Target TBD — depends on who brings the expertise. Likely candidates include a generic arm64 board (Raspberry Pi class) and an Apple Silicon Mac of some era. At least one has to boot to a console by the end of Q1.

  • Platform expert for the chosen board
  • Working serial console and storage driver on hardware
  • Installer that produces a bootable SD card or USB drive
  • "How to install darwinOS on your <board>" guide

Q2 2027 — Package manager

A real package manager with a real repository. Content- addressed storage, signed packages, reproducible builds. The RFC will land well before the code.

  • Package format finalised via RFC
  • First 100 packages in the repo (shell, coreutils, editors, toolchain, languages)
  • Signed release artefacts
  • Build farm for multi-architecture publishing

H2 2027 — Security & stability

By the end of 2027, darwinOS should be boring — in the good sense. Predictable boot, hardened defaults, no footguns.

  • AMFI and codesigning enforced by default
  • Sandbox profiles for every shipping daemon
  • System integrity protection enforced on release builds
  • First 1.0 candidate

Keep track