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Unix Compatibility

André Borchert edited this page Aug 9, 2026 · 8 revisions

Unix Compatibility

XAIOS is a freestanding Unix-like operating system with its own syscall and userspace ABI. FreeBSD is the primary external behavioral reference for portable command, SSH/SFTP and network work.

This does not mean that XAIOS is FreeBSD-derived or FreeBSD binary compatible. XAIOS also does not implement a Linux binary ABI. Passing a client gate establishes only the tested command or wire behavior.

Current Evidence

Client Current QEMU evidence
FreeBSD 15.1 AArch64 Official checksum-pinned VM; OpenSSH public-key acceptance and rejection, xaiosctl, SFTP write/stat/read/rename/remove, interactive PTY ANSI htop, and UDP echo.
macOS Native OpenSSH/SFTP administration and one-guest parallel load coverage.
Debian 13 Independent Linux/OpenSSH cross-client coverage for password policy, rekey, administration, persistence, concurrency, interactive PTY htop and malformed network traffic.

Run the FreeBSD reference gate with:

make qemu-freebsd-network-suite

The first run downloads the official compressed FreeBSD image into ~/.cache/xaios/freebsd. Both the compressed archive and decompressed image are SHA-256 checked. Tests use a disposable overlay; the cached vendor image is not modified.

See the authoritative repository document: Unix compatibility boundary.

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