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THOX.ai Research · Technical report v1.0.1 · 2026-11-03

Preprint, not peer reviewed

ThoxOS and ThoxInux: An Evidence-Bounded Architecture for a Local-First AI Operating System

The reviewed foundation (ThoxInux on Ginux) fixed as the architecture of record, the entitlement and update contracts tested as executable properties and fault simulations, the Linux-ABI ledger read at the pin and joined with a traced agent loop, and the kernel-model memory budget computed from the cards.

Craig Ross

Chief Executive Officer

ORCID 0009-0005-9872-3673

Tommy Xaypanya

CTO and Co-Founder (corresponding author)

ORCID 0009-0000-4425-9565

THOX.ai LLC · Cedar Park, Texas · November 3, 2026

Abstract

An operating system for local AI must carry an evidence chain from kernel behaviour to application execution, model quality and physical device operation, and the THOX record for ThoxOS™ has changed shape twice in four days: a 31 October whitepaper specified a Linux LTS fork, and a 1 November review draft identifies ThoxInux, a Ginux-derived Rust-first x86-64 kernel, as the reviewed foundation. This report fixes the architecture against that reviewed foundation and adds the evidence a general host can produce. We implement the entitlement contract clean-room in two token designs and show by executable properties that the shared-secret HMAC design accepts a token forged by any device that can verify one, while an Ed25519 design rejects it at 196 microseconds per verification on a 2-vCPU host, and that a wall-clock grace window is revived by a clock rollback unless a persisted high-water mark is used. We simulate the A/B update contract under injected faults: the full contract ends every one of 200 updates on a known-good slot with at most 3 boots of recovery, while removing the signature check boots 6 tampered images and removing the attempt counter or the second slot leaves about 26 devices unbootable per run. We read the upstream Linux-ABI ledger at the exact commit ThoxInux pins (375 dispatched syscalls: 82 Complete, 245 Partial, 48 Policy-denied) and join it with a strace of a reference agent loop on the authoring host: of 56 distinct syscalls the loop issues, 10 are Complete, 46 Partial and 0 Policy-denied, so a plain agent loop touches nothing the policy refuses and almost nothing that is proven equivalent to Linux. We compute the memory budget for the three published kernel models from their card geometry: the 0.8B student fits the 2 GB Air floor with 36,769 tokens of context at a 1 GB reserve and nothing at 1.5 GB; the 4B student fits the 4 GB Mini floor only at 7,350 tokens; the 27B teacher needs a host above 16 GB. No ThoxInux boot, no device, no model inference and no production security were executed here; the validation protocol that would produce those results is restated with its gates.

196 µs

Ed25519 token verify on a 2-vCPU host; HMAC 12 µs. HMAC accepts a verifier-forged token, Ed25519 rejects it

Measured

200 / 200

Updates ending on a known-good slot under the full A/B contract with injected faults, with 26 automatic rollbacks and at most 3 recovery boots; no signature check boots 6 tampered images

Simulated

375

Linux-ABI ledger entries read at the ThoxInux pin: 82 Complete, 245 Partial, 48 Policy-denied; a traced agent loop touches 10 Complete of 56 distinct syscalls

Observed + Measured

7,350 tok

Largest context for ThoxOS-Kernel-4B Q4_K_M resident on the 4 GB Mini floor at a 1 GB reserve; no fit at 1.5 GB

Calculated

Download the paper (PDF)Browser demo

Contents

  1. Executive summary
  2. 1. Introduction
  3. 2. Background and related work
  4. 3. System and threat model
  5. 4. Design
  6. 5. Implementation
  7. 6. Evaluation
  8. 7. Discussion and limitations
  9. 8. Conclusion
  10. 9. Roadmap and decisions for the founders
  11. Appendix A. Reproducibility
  12. Appendix B. Notation
  13. Appendix C. Authorship and disclosure
  14. References

Where the paper lives

  • Read the report (PDF)

    THOX_ThoxOS_Research_Paper_v1.0.1.pdf, hosted on this site

  • Read the report (HTML)

    THOX_ThoxOS_Research_Paper_v1.0.1.html, hosted on this site

  • Zenodo record (DOI)

    DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23969073: paper PDF, HTML edition, browser demo and artifact ZIP (concept DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23969072)

  • Browser demo

    ThoxOS Contracts Demo: the report’s entitlement and update contracts, running client-side in a single HTML file

  • Source and experiments

    ttracx/thox-research-paper, papers/thoxos/v1.0.1: paper source, experiment code, results and the artifact bundle

  • GitHub release

    thoxos-v1.0.1 in the thox-research-paper repository, with the canonical pack files attached

  • Hugging Face paper repository

    Thox-ai/ThoxOS-Paper: the paper’s dataset page, citing this edition as current

Cite this paper

@misc{ross_craig_2026_thoxos101,
  author       = {Ross, Craig and
                  Xaypanya, Tommy},
  title        = {{ThoxOS and ThoxInux: An Evidence-Bounded Architecture for
                   a Local-First AI Operating System}},
  month        = nov,
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {THOX.ai Research},
  version      = {v1.0.1},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.23969073},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23969073}
}

Preprint, not peer reviewed. DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23969073 (Zenodo; concept DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23969072).

The earlier draft: 0.2.0-review

ThoxOS and ThoxInux: Architecture, Evidence, and a Validation Protocol for Local-First AI — the public technical draft of November 1, 2026, by Craig Ross and Tommy Xaypanya, THOX.ai LLC. The report above builds on this draft and treats it as a historical source: it identified ThoxInux, the Ginux-derived Rust-first x86-64 foundation, and defined the validation protocol v1.0.1 executes in part. The draft’s version of record is its Zenodo deposit.

DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23876230

Status of this draft

This is a public technical draft. Experimental validation is incomplete, and the paper has not been peer reviewed. An arXiv submission is in progress; no arXiv version of this draft exists yet. The version of record is the Zenodo deposit at the DOI above, which carries the manuscript, its LaTeX source, bibliography, and the 28-claim evidence ledger every claim in the paper is scoped against.

Download the earlier draft (PDF)Zenodo record

Models in the draft

The draft’s evidence ledger scopes the records of the three ThoxOS kernel models. Their public status, as recorded in the draft:

  • ThoxOS-Kernel-0.8B

    Released. Its gate record is among the model results scoped in the draft’s evidence ledger.

  • ThoxOS-Kernel-4B

    The documented baseline in the draft. Not promoted.

  • ThoxOS-Kernel-27B

    Host-tier teacher. Its weights are public: the model card lists public GGUF and safetensors builds. The 0.2.0-review draft called it card-only, weights not public; the v1.0.1 report follows the cards and flags that line for correction, and this page is corrected accordingly.

Cite the earlier draft

@misc{ross_craig_2026_23876230,
  author       = {Ross, Craig and
                  Xaypanya, Tommy},
  title        = {{ThoxOS and ThoxInux: Architecture, Evidence, and a
                   Validation Protocol for Local-First AI}},
  month        = nov,
  year         = 2026,
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  version      = {0.2.0-review},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.23876230},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23876230}
}

Licensed CC BY 4.0, matching the Zenodo record.

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