Downloads

One file. The ISO carries its own root filesystem, boots to the desktop on its own, and can install itself onto a disk.

Binaries live on GitHub Releases, not in this site’s repository.

v0.2.0released 9 August 2026Release notes

What you get

edos-x86_64.iso is a hybrid ISO holding Limine, the kernel, and a complete GPT disk image as a Limine boot module. The kernel exposes that module as a RAM-backed block device and mounts it as the root filesystem, so the live system is fully writable, and everything written to it is gone on reboot.

The ISO’s boot menu has two entries. Both control which filesystem the kernel mounts as its root:

Entry	What it mounts
`edos`	An EDOS installation on a real disk, if the machine has one. The live root otherwise.
`edos (live root)`	The live root, even on a machine that already has EDOS installed.

Installing does not leave you tied to the ISO. edos-install writes Limine, the kernel and a matching limine.conf to the target disk’s EFI partition, so that disk boots on its own and never reads the live root again. The ISO is only needed to run the installer.

Run it in QEMU

Nothing but the ISO:

qemu-system-x86_64 \
  -machine q35,accel=kvm \
  -cpu host -smp 4 -m 2G \
  -drive if=pflash,format=raw,readonly=on,file=/usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_CODE.fd \
  -drive if=pflash,format=raw,file=OVMF_VARS.fd \
  -cdrom edos-x86_64.iso \
  -device virtio-vga \
  -device qemu-xhci -device usb-kbd -device usb-mouse \
  -serial stdio

Copy OVMF_VARS.fd out of /usr/share/OVMF/ first; QEMU writes to it.

To install to a disk instead of running live, add a blank one:

qemu-img create -f qcow2 disk.img 8G

  -drive id=sata0,if=none,format=qcow2,file=disk.img \
  -device ide-hd,drive=sata0,bus=ide.1

Then, in the guest, run edos-install /dev/sda. See On real hardware for what the installer does.

Write it to a USB stick

The ISO is hybrid, so it goes on directly:

sudo dd if=edos-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync

Boot it as a UEFI device.

Verify what you downloaded

GitHub records a SHA-256 digest for every asset:

gh release view --json assets -R edg-l/edos-v2 \
  --jq '.assets[] | "\(.name) \(.digest)"'
sha256sum edos-x86_64.iso

Build it instead

make all produces the same ISO from the current tree, which is always ahead of the newest release. The build guide covers the toolchain.

Known limits

Graphics is virtio-gpu only, so on bare metal you get whatever the firmware left in the framebuffer. Storage is AHCI; there is no NVMe driver, so a machine with only NVMe can run the live system but has nothing to install onto. There are no accounts and no permission checks. The journal covers metadata, not file data.