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 for the complete inventory and the changelog 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 — 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.

Get started

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

make -C examples/threads BOARD=host run

Follow the getting-started guide.

License

Revera is dual-licensed: free for noncommercial, educational, and evaluation use under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0, or under a commercial license 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 (which also covers the contributor license the dual license requires).