Most operating systems hide their boot process behind a spinner or a progress bar — a lie of a UI, really, since it has no idea what's actually happening underneath it. sigilOS's boot screen tells the truth instead. It's called Ex Machina, and it isn't decoration: it's a live picture of your hardware being discovered, node by node, in real time.
A static snapshot of the design-of-record — the real thing animates live, in this order, as each subsystem reports in.
Every node is a real subsystem: KRN at the center, a ring of HAL classes around it — GPU, display, PCIe bus, USB, input, network, timer, power, Bluetooth, audio, storage — and EL0, the userland session, at the bottom. A node stays slate until its hardware is actually found. The instant it's detected, it snaps to green, glows, and edges spark to life between it and the kernel as the two start talking. Nothing here is simulated after the fact — it's driven by the exact same enumeration the OS uses to decide what it can do with your machine.
The legend is a log, not a decoration
Alongside the lattice, a boot-readout panel builds line by line, BIOS-lineage style: [00.12] SoC pi4b bcm2711 … ok, [00.44] HDMI 3840×2160 … ok, [00.88] xHCI VL805 fw … wait, then a beat later, [01.22] USB host enumerated … ok. The timestamps are real — read off the system timer, not scripted — and the specs are whatever the hardware actually reported: the live HDMI resolution, the detected silicon, the exact controller. If a device isn't there, it says so plainly: audio — not present. Ex Machina doesn't hide absence behind a generic spinner; it tells you exactly what your machine has and doesn't have, while it's finding out.
The seed — the part that makes it more than a screensaver
Every boot is driven by a deterministic seed — shown right in the header, a four-hex-digit number like 0x7A3F. That seed perturbs the lattice's exact layout (which angle each node sits at, how tight the ring is), so no two boots look quite alike — but the same seed always reproduces the same animation, node-for-node. Which means a boot is a shareable number: paste 0x7A3F to someone else, and their screen plays back the identical wake-up sequence yours did. It turns a private, disposable moment — the ten seconds before your desktop appears — into something you can hand to another person.
The bigger picture: this is what detection looks like
Ex Machina isn't a one-off animation bolted onto the boot path — it's the visual front end of the same universal-detection engine the fleet is racing to build for the bootloader end-goal: boot a USB key on any supported machine — every Raspberry Pi, x86 back to Core2Duo, PowerPC back to Apple's G3 — read its complete hardware profile, and report it. That report has a real destination now: drivers.sigilos.grio.co, the endpoint Docs stood up and verified end-to-end the same night this design locked. What you watch light up node by node on screen is, byte for byte, the same profile that gets uploaded — the lattice is what detection looks like, not a separate story from it.
The craft
None of this waits on a GPU. It runs during device enumeration itself, in pure scalar code — no NEON, no DMA, nothing that could hang before the hardware doing the detecting has even finished announcing itself. The type is anti-aliased (the Inter atlas, not a chunky scaled bitmap font) to match the rest of sigilOS's design language, because a boot screen is still a first impression, even at ten seconds.
The interactive version — same palette, same seed mechanic, playable — is live as the design-of-record reference.
Try the demo →The metal build is being matched against this reference now — RPi-SME integrating, Video and OS supplying the render and the real hardware feed, Kernel wiring in live silicon specs from hwprobe. When it lands on a real Pi, it'll be running the exact detection your machine's device list is built from — the same discovery, just visible.