From firmware to shell, bootloader to desktop OS — we craft minimal, fast, and beautiful open-source tools for people who care about every byte.
infastracture is a collection of Linux infrastructure projects designed for power users, system administrators, and the ricing community. Every tool is built from scratch with a focus on performance, minimalism, and clean code.
infastracture is an open-source project organization focused on building foundational Linux infrastructure tools. The name is a play on "infrastructure" — because every great system needs a solid foundation underneath it.
The project was born out of frustration with existing tools that have grown bloated over decades. Bash is over 2,000 lines of shell script. GRUB carries legacy code from the 1990s. SeaBIOS supports hardware that nobody uses anymore. We believe there is a better way — tools that do one thing, do it fast, and get out of your way.
Currently, infastracture maintains four projects spanning the entire Linux stack: a desktop operating system called Atmos, a minimal shell called cmshell, a lightweight BIOS implementation called inSeaBIOS, and a Rust-based bootloader called proboot. Each project is independently useful, but together they represent a vision of what a minimal Linux system can look like from the ground up.
All projects are released under permissive open-source licenses. There are no premium tiers, no telemetry, no data collection, and no phone-home mechanisms. The source code is the documentation. If you can read the code, you understand the tool.
Every project under the infastracture umbrella is designed to be minimal, fast, and opinionated. We do not try to be everything for everyone — we build tools that we ourselves want to use every day.
Atmos is a complete Linux desktop distribution built around Hyprland, the popular Wayland tiling compositor. Unlike other Hyprland-based distros that hand you a bare config and wish you luck, Atmos comes with a carefully designed visual theme out of the box.
The default theme uses a Catppuccin-inspired blue palette with custom border colors, smooth fade and slide animations, and a consistent look across Waybar, wofi, and GTK applications. It is ISO-ready, meaning you can flash it to a USB drive and install it on bare metal in minutes. The upcoming Atmos 27.1 release will be built on the next version of Hyprland with a redesigned theme engine and GTK4 support.
cmshell is a lightweight UNIX shell written from scratch in C. The entire project compiles to a binary under 5 kilobytes with absolutely zero runtime dependencies — no libc wrappers, no shared libraries, no external config parsers.
Despite its tiny size, cmshell includes features that ricing enthusiasts actually need: customizable ANSI-colored prompts, tab completion for commands and file paths, command history with up/down arrow navigation, and a clean config file format. It is designed as a drop-in alternative to bash or zsh for users who want a faster, lighter terminal experience without giving up the features that make their setup look good.
inSeaBIOS is a stripped-down fork of SeaBIOS, the standard open-source x86 BIOS implementation used in QEMU and many embedded systems. The goal is to remove decades of legacy hardware support that most users do not need.
The target is a flash image under 32KB — compared to SeaBIOS's 256KB+ — with POST times under 100 milliseconds on modern hardware. This makes inSeaBIOS particularly interesting for QEMU/KVM virtual machines where every millisecond of boot time matters, as well as for retro computing and embedded x86 systems where flash storage is limited.
proboot is a next-generation Linux bootloader written entirely in Rust. It is designed as a modern replacement for GRUB2, which has accumulated significant technical debt over its 20+ year history. proboot aims to be faster, safer, and easier to configure.
Key planned features include native LUKS2 decryption (eliminating the need for a separate initramfs for many setups), TPM2 unlock support, a themeable TUI boot menu, and an automated GRUB-to-proboot migration tool. Rust's memory safety guarantees mean an entire class of bootloader bugs — buffer overflows, use-after-free — simply cannot exist in proboot by construction.
Installing infastracture tools is straightforward. cmshell builds with a single make command and installs to your PATH immediately. Atmos provides a ready-to-flash ISO image that you can write to any USB drive. Here is how to get started with the currently available projects.
The Linux ecosystem has a bloat problem. Tools that started as simple utilities have accumulated features, configuration options, and dependencies over decades. The bash shell, for example, contains over 2,000 lines of shell script just for its startup sequence. GRUB2's codebase includes support for file systems and hardware that have been obsolete for years.
This bloat is not free. Every extra line of code means more attack surface for security vulnerabilities. Every unnecessary dependency means more packages to update and more potential points of failure. Every millisecond of startup time adds up when you are booting hundreds of virtual machines or working in a terminal all day.
infastracture takes a different approach. We start from scratch and only implement what is actually needed. The result is tools that are faster to start, smaller to distribute, easier to audit for security, and simpler to maintain. This is not a new idea — it is the original Unix philosophy. We are just applying it to infrastructure software that has lost its way.
Every project follows the same set of core principles. These are not aspirational goals — they are hard constraints that we enforce during code review.
Every project is stripped to its absolute essentials. No unnecessary features, no hidden dependencies, no code that serves legacy use cases. If a feature is not used by at least half our users, it does not ship.
Sub-millisecond shell startup, sub-100ms BIOS POST, instant bootloader handoff. We benchmark every release against the tools we are replacing and refuse to ship if we are not significantly faster.
All projects use MIT or GPL licenses. There is no telemetry, no phone-home, no premium tier, and no "open core" model. The source code you see is everything there is.
Built by members of the ricing community, for the ricing community. Every project supports deep theming, custom colors, and visual configuration out of the box — not as an afterthought.
We use memory-safe languages wherever possible. proboot is written in Rust. cmshell avoids dynamic memory allocation entirely. Smaller codebases mean fewer places for bugs to hide.
Comprehensive README files, inline code comments, and wiki documentation. Our rule: if a new user cannot figure out how to use a tool within five minutes, that is a bug we need to fix.
infastracture projects are built for a specific audience: people who care deeply about how their systems work. Here are some of the use cases our tools are designed for.
The ricing community — users who obsessively customize their desktop environments, terminal emulators, and system themes — is the primary audience for cmshell and Atmos. These users want tools that look good, start fast, and can be configured to match their aesthetic. cmshell's ANSI prompt support and Atmos's pre-built theme system are designed specifically for this workflow.
When you are managing hundreds or thousands of Linux machines, every millisecond of boot time and every kilobyte of disk space matters. inSeaBIOS's tiny flash image and sub-100ms POST time make it interesting for large-scale virtualization deployments where GRUB or SeaBIOS add unnecessary overhead to every VM boot.
Embedded x86 systems often have severely limited flash storage — sometimes as little as 64KB for the entire firmware. inSeaBIOS's 32KB target size makes it one of the few open-source BIOS implementations that can fit in these constraints. Retro computing enthusiasts also benefit from faster boot times on older hardware.
This is our planned development timeline. Dates are estimates and may shift as priorities change, but we try to ship on schedule.
Plugin system using shared libraries, Lua scripting support for prompt customization, and built-in syntax highlighting for terminal output.
Plugin system using shared libraries, Lua scripting support for prompt customization, and built-in syntax highlighting for terminal output.
First stable release with Secure Boot support, Btrfs snapshot booting, automatic kernel fallback, and the GRUB migration tool.
Built on the next Hyprland release with a completely redesigned theme engine, GTK4 application port, and cloud sync for dotfiles across machines.
Built on the next Hyprland release with a completely redesigned theme engine, GTK4 application port, and cloud sync for dotfiles across machines.
Native UEFI firmware mode with graphical configuration menu, PXE network boot support, and compatibility with modern UEFI-only hardware.
Answers to common questions about infastracture and its projects.
infastracture is maintained entirely in free time. Donations help cover domain registration, server hosting, CI/CD runners, and development tools. Every contribution makes a difference.
Covers a month of domain registration for the project.
Helps pay for CI/CD runners and release hosting costs.
Covers a full month of server hosting and development tools.