> When security researchers want to understand what a modern processor is really doing with the kind of detail that determines whether attacks like Spectre and Meltdown are possible, they usually run their experiments on top of an operating system that was never built for the job. They open up macOS or Linux, patch the kernel by hand, and hope the modifications hold. The approach is unstable, hard to reproduce, and on Apple’s platforms, slated for deprecation.

> A team at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) decided to build something different. Fractal, an operating system kernel written from the ground up, treats the hardware itself as the object of study.

> Fractal supports x86_64, ARM64, and RISC-V, and consists of more than 31,000 lines of code. The team designed it as infrastructure rather than as a single experiment, with familiar POSIX system calls, a C library, and ports of standard tools like vim, GCC, and the dash shell, so that researchers can move existing experiment code over with minimal friction.

I was around the "what does the hardware really do?" space 4-ish decades ago - hacking together your own Minimum Viable OS was table stakes.

Obviously MIT's Fractal is vastly larger than anything we did back then - but is anyone in this space now, to comment on how special Fractal is...or isn't?

PHDs should be tool masters not knowledge basins.

Great to see.

I am very confused by calling this kind of work "researches".

They are not pushing the boundary of human knowledge - they are playing game (reverse engineering) with other human.. maybe that is me having a very narrow definition of "research"

The results are interesting but the whole project is worth a look.

https://people.csail.mit.edu/mengjia/data/2026.SP.fractal.pd...

Will it allow them install personally-made software, or will it require Google's approval?

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