# Announcing Revera 0.1.0

**A small real-time kernel with hardware-enforced isolation — the first packaged release, from VIACERTO LLC.**

Revera is a portable real-time kernel for microcontrollers and embedded SoCs. It gives you the usual RTOS
services — preemptive priority scheduling, mutexes, semaphores, condition variables, SMP and AMP — and one
thing most don't: a memory **fence the hardware enforces even against the kernel itself**.

## Why Revera

A fault or a compromise in one thread — or one whole scheduling *island* — should not be able to reach
another's memory. On most kernels that boundary holds by convention. On Revera it is backed by the
MPU/MMU/bus: threads run unprivileged behind a syscall boundary, each thread's stack is guarded, and a
per-island **supervisor fence** confines even privileged kernel code. The name is Latin *re vera*, "in
truth" — the guarantees are meant to be real, not asserted.

That fence is the differentiator, and it is proven across **five protection mechanisms and two classes**
(region-based MPUs on ARM v8-M / Cortex-R / AURIX, and paging on RISC-V Sv32 / ARM VMSA) on real and emulated
hardware.

## What's in 0.1.0

This first *development* release packages the differentiated kernel honestly:

- **The kernel** — preemptive scheduling (+ optional EDF), priority-inheritance / recursive / errorcheck
  mutexes, semaphores, condition variables, join/detach, per-thread attributes; **SMP and AMP** on one
  portable core.
- **Hardware-enforced isolation** — per-thread stack guarding, unprivileged threads, and the supervisor /
  per-island fence.
- **Ports** across ARM Cortex-M / -A / -R, RISC-V, and AURIX TriCore, plus HAL-level C2000 / MSP430 and a
  desktop build.
- **Observability** — a portable trace ring + SEGGER SystemView, and post-mortem fault/panic decoding.
- **A pthread-shaped** compatibility subset, so embedded-Linux thread code ports mechanically.
- **A test harness** — host unit suites and live-kernel QEMU arch suites, both green — plus SemVer, a
  changelog, a dual license, a getting-started guide, and a full API reference.

See the [release manifest](../release-manifest.md) for the complete inventory and the
[changelog](../../CHANGELOG.md) for the details.

## Honest scope

0.1.0 is deliberately the **differentiated kernel + a minimal HAL** (GPIO / UART / timer). Broader
peripheral breadth, the security/safety planes, and additional targets are documented as a tiered
[roadmap](../roadmap.md) — not implied as done. The transparency about what is and isn't here is a feature,
not a caveat. Per-feature, per-target maturity lives in the [readiness dashboard](../readiness-1.0.0/dashboard.md).

## Get started

From nothing to a running kernel in about ten minutes — on your desktop, under QEMU, then your own app:

```sh
make -C examples/threads BOARD=host run
```

Follow the [getting-started guide](../guides/getting-started.md).

## License

Revera is **dual-licensed**: free for noncommercial, educational, and evaluation use under the
[PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0](../../LICENSE), or under a
[commercial license](../../LICENSE-COMMERCIAL.md) from VIACERTO LLC for building it into products you sell.
Evaluate it for free; license it commercially before you ship.

## Feedback

Proving Revera out on real workloads and hardware is exactly what this stage needs. Bug reports and
questions are welcome — please include the board/arch, the build configuration, and how to reproduce. See
[CONTRIBUTING](../../CONTRIBUTING.md) (which also covers the contributor license the dual license requires).