Smech Labs Documentation Welcome
Everything you need to build, install, and operate the Smech Labs software stack — SmechOS, SmechVisor, spk, spk-visor, and SmechDeploy.
Projects
Smech Labs builds a sovereign, open-standard compute stack from the ground up. Nothing here is a rebrand or a thin wrapper around an existing distribution.
| Project | What it is | Status |
|---|---|---|
| SmechOS | Independent Linux distribution — KDE Plasma 6, custom build pipeline, no upstream distro base | Beta |
| spk | SmechOS package manager — fetches .tar.xz packages from GitHub Releases via curl, no Portage/Flatpak | Beta |
| SmechVisor | Sovereign bare-metal hypervisor OS — OpenRC, cloud-hypervisor, web control plane. Install-only, no live mode | Alpha |
| spk-visor | SmechVisor CLI — live OTA updates and network deployment via the Deploy Shim | Alpha |
| SmechDeploy | Build pipeline — shell/Python scripts that compile everything from source into raw disk images | Alpha |
Philosophy
Every piece of the Smech Labs stack is built with the same set of principles:
Independence over convenience
SmechOS is not based on Ubuntu, Arch, Gentoo, or any other distribution.
The kernel is compiled by SmechDeploy. The installer is a Rust binary we wrote.
The package manager calls nothing except curl and tar.
There is no mystery in the stack.
Sovereignty over abstraction
SmechVisor uses cloud-hypervisor directly — no QEMU device emulation layer,
no libvirt XML. The init system is OpenRC — no systemd journal, no binary logs,
no socket activation sprawl. Every service is a readable shell script.
Sealed over packageable
SmechVisor is an appliance OS. You do not apt install things onto it.
You update it via spk-visor entire-system-upgrade (live, no reboot for
daemon updates) or redeploy it via the network shim. This is the same model
Proxmox VE, VMware ESXi, and Hyper-V Server use.
Open source, open hardware
All source code is published under Smech Labs on GitHub. Bug reports and feature requests go to the issue tracker.