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Theia

Theia is an Adaptive-AUTOSAR-Platform-style framework: a set of Functional Clusters (FCs) running as supervised POSIX processes on a custom C++ actor runtime ("the Theia runtime"), with the whole system modeled in the artheia .art DSL and built with Bazel.

It is a standalone git repository carrying artheia/ and third_party/etcd-cpp-apiv3/ as git submodules. You do not edit Theia's own tree to build an application — you scaffold a separate consuming workspace with theia init, bound to an installed /opt/theia prefix (the /opt/ros/<distro> analogue). Theia's own apps/ directory is the framework dogfooding that same flow in CI.

What Theia gives you

• A C++ actor runtime (GenServer / GenStateM / GenRunnable) with one thread per node, TIPC transport carrying nanopb wire bytes, and correlated request/reply via RemoteRef / RemoteCodec.
• A supervisor that fork/exec's the FC daemons, owns their lifecycle and Function-Group state, runs a heartbeat watchdog, and exposes a control surface — Theia's realization of AUTOSAR Execution Management.
• Six real service FCs (com, log, per, sm, ucm, shwa) plus the AUTOSAR-named placeholders, all declared in .art.
• A code-generation pipeline that turns the .art model into C++ daemons and into the four AUTOSAR deployment manifests (machine / application / service / execution) as JSON.

The abstraction ladder

Everything in .art rests on three primitives:

Primitive	Is a	Owns
node	thread	one TIPC type/instance, ports, a GenServer / GenStateM / GenRunnable
composition	process (one executable)	prototypes (node instances) + in-process wiring (connect)
cluster	distribution bundle	compositions + inter-process wiring; the deploy / packaging unit

Install

Theia ships as Debian packages under /opt/theia (built per-Ubuntu: _ubuntu22.04_ / _ubuntu24.04_). The Python tooling (artheia, rf-theia) ships on PyPI. The short version:

# framework debs from the GitHub release (add runtime, runtime-dev, services, services-dev)
sudo apt-get install -y ./theia-*_ubuntu22.04_*.deb
# the Python tooling into your own venv
pip install artheia rf-theia
source /opt/theia/setup.bash        # exports THEIA_ROOT=/opt/theia, puts `theia` on PATH

See Tutorial for the full clean-host walkthrough.

Wiki pages

Page	What's in it
Tutorial	Primary getting-started: install from release debs + PyPI, scaffold a workspace, run the stack
Architecture	The runtime, the supervisor, and the FC catalog
Deployment-Manifest-Generation-and-Serialization	The .art → manifest → JSON pipeline and its commands
Cross-Compiling-for-Other-Boards	Cross-compile the runtime .deb to aarch64 boards (rpi4, BeagleBone AI-64, …)
Manifest-Structure-and-ARA-Requirements	Adaptive-AUTOSAR doctrine and how Theia realizes it
Configuration-and-Migration	params (static RO JSON) vs config (etcd proto), and the config-schema migration tooling
Advanced-Tools	tdb, rtdb, and the supervisor GUI
MCP-and-Skills	The artheia + rf-theia MCP servers and the Claude Code skills

Related wikis

• artheia — the .art DSL, parser, generators, and manifest model: https://github.com/perotheia/artheia/wiki
• rf-theia — the Robot Framework + TPT testing harness: https://github.com/perotheia/rf-theia/wiki