The headline is simple: the sigilOS login screen now renders on real hardware — @grio's physical x86-64 box and a Raspberry Pi 4B. Not QEMU. Metal. Here's where the fleet stands today.
x86: full login on metal
The x86 login card renders correctly on @grio's machine — "sigilOS" titlebar, grioghar(admin) and dev(standard) user cards with avatars, password field, Sign-in button. Crisp, correct colors, stable, no freeze. It took a careful bisection (VER=4 pink → VER=9 solid green → VER=11 rects → VER=12 full glyph text) to get there, and the win is backed by cc0's new bounded glyph rasterizer — the font subsystem, a 1.0 gate.
The last x86 mile is the keyboard. The diagnostic that cracked it open: watch the lock-LED. It flashes the instant VBUS arrives, before any enumeration — so a lit LED means "power is fine, chase the enum," and a dark LED means "no power, chase the controller." On x86 the keyboard lights, so it's an enumeration problem; VER=17 forces the xHCI MMIO uncached (the same cached-MMIO class of bug we hit on the Pi).
Pi: it renders and talks
The Pi 4B renders the login too — and after a long grind, it finally talks serial on metal. The root cause was a great catch: the kernel had only ever read GPFSEL1, never written it, so the UART pins were never muxed to ALT0. Stacked on top of a cached-MMIO issue (fixed by clearing the data cache while keeping the MMU on, so the firmware peripheral map stays intact), that's what kept the port silent. Both are fixed.
The deeper lesson, now a standing rule: every debug code prints on-screen, not just to UART — the framebuffer is the one output that works on every board, and x86 has no serial at all.
The build itself went all-Sigil
The 15-minute compile that made every metal iteration painful is gone. cc0 retired the Python build harness (build.py + keystone) and now emits bootable Pi/x86 images with its own native backend — zero Python, zero keystone in the emit path. That closes a long-standing "build tools in Sigil" goal and kills the iteration bottleneck in one move.
Around the fleet
- The Lumen desktop is a real workspace now — menu bar, icon grid, GPU glyph atlas, wallpaper, clipboard, tooltips, a dock, and the Doom Pile (hover the dock's locator and every window sprawls into a dense, find-able stack). See the mockups.
- RetroPie crossed 75 systems with WASM-4 carts running cap-sandboxed as EL0 apps, and closed the controller 1.0 gate (Xbox One BT mapping + hotplug). BIOS manager, save-state thumbnails, rewind + scanline all shipped.
- Apps is at 162+ modules — the browser (render, chrome, tabs, history, bookmarks, settings, downloads, find-bar) plus the whole dock stack.
- FS is deep into storage: SigDB query/index/views/joins/WAL/savepoints, CAS dedup + defrag + compaction, overlay mounts, Relic store/seal/verify, a
/logsboot sink, and search/tag/thumbnail indexes feeding Smart Folders.
Where we are
0.5 (desktop) and 0.6 (remote + x86 desktop) are shipped. 0.7 — the web milestone — is in progress, and the render-on-metal proof is the foundation everything interactive sits on. The full engineering story is in the build journal; the day-by-day detail is in the changelog.