// systems engineering · from rasterizer to kernel
The Laplace Project
A native operating-system kernel with a dual-build game & graphics engine fused directly into kernel space. Six years of low-level engineering — a software rasterizer, an ECS game server, and finally a zero-copy kernel you can boot right here in your browser.
Boot it in your browser
LplKernel runs locally in your tab via v86 — no install, no backend. Each ISO is ~3 MB and downloads on demand.
Click to download the ISO and start the emulator.
In the text profile you can type commands: help, stats, kbd, layout fr, pci. Click the screen to capture your keyboard. Runs single-threaded (GitHub Pages can't set cross-origin isolation headers), so boot takes a few seconds.
Engineering locks we broke
The interesting parts aren't the features — they're the constraints. Here is what made the architecture hard, and how it's solved.
Kernel-space engine
LplPlugin is compiled natively into LplKernel and runs in ring-0 — no syscall boundary between the engine and the hardware.
Zero-copy data path
UDP packets are injected from the NIC toward the GPU without intermediate copies, collapsing the classic network→render latency chain.
Lock-free concurrency
SPSC ring buffers with acquire/release barriers and generational IDs (ABA-safe) drive the interrupt→main-loop hand-off.
Cache-friendly ECS
Structure-of-Arrays layout keeps hot component data contiguous, and spatial partitioning (Morton / Octree) tames O(N²) at MMO scale.
Figures from stress tests — see the papers for methodology.
The lineage
LplKernel
coreA from-scratch kernel: paging, SMP bring-up, APIC/IOAPIC, PCI, a determinism-first PMM, and LplPlugin running natively in ring-0.
LplPlugin
activeThe dual-build engine — graphics, physics, ECS — that supersedes and unifies the two earlier projects, now embeddable directly into the kernel.
Engine-3D
legacyThe first graphics engine: hand-rolled 3D math and software rasterization in pure C, with a minimalist physics core. Where it all started.
Flakkari
legacyAn ECS game server with its own protocol, JSON-driven scenes, entity templating, and multi-instance hosting — the networking ancestor of LplPlugin's server build.