The Ironclad Operating System Kernel
Ironclad is a formally verified, hard real-time capable kernel for general-purpose and embedded uses, written in SPARK and Ada. It is comprised of 100% free software, free in the sense that it respects the user's freedom, and is distributed under the GPLv3 or Later license.
Some of the supported features are:
- A familiar POSIX-compatible interface.
- True simultaneous preemptive multitasking.
- Advanced cryptography and a security-centered architecture.
- Mandatory Access Control (MAC).
- Highly configurable, hard real-time scheduling.
- Support for several architectures and boards.
News
- 2024-Dec-30: Ironclad @ FOSDEM 2025.
- 2024-Dec-13: A new face for Ironclad.
- 2024-Oct-13: Ironclad joins the NLNet NGI0 Core initiative.
- 2024-Jun-09: AEiC 2024 presentation.
- 2024-Mar-30: Ironclad distributions and the xz-utils backdoor.
- 2023-Oct-31: Ironclad 0.5.0 released.
Further news can be read here.
Releases
All releases can be found here. They are signed using PGP, please check the signatures before using the downloaded tarballs using the release keyring.
Ironclad uses semantic versioning. Support and bug fixes will be done for major versions for no shorter than 6 months since release, to be extended as seen fit. When a period is extended, there will be a corresponding announcement on the RSS feed.
Who uses Ironclad?
Some distributions use Ironclad as its kernel, for example, visit Gloire, a general purpose desktop OS using Ironclad along GNU userland tools. Here are some images of Gloire: