An operating system, a graphics stack, and everything between.
microZeus is an ecosystem of nine systems projects — a multi-architecture OS, its own bootloader, BIOS, and device trees, a Vulkan-based UI stack, and a complete software implementation of Vulkan itself. Almost entirely pure C, built from first principles. The whole stack, hand-drawn.
Sheet 1 of 10 — hover any block to trace its dependencies.
Sheet index — the drawing set
- Sheet 2/10Operating SystemmzOS2
A minimal, multi-architecture operating system with one unified build.
- Sheet 3/10Firmware · BootloadermzBoot
A GRUB-like two-stage bootloader and complete disk-preparation toolchain.
- Sheet 4/10Firmware · BIOSmzBIOS
A unified BIOS implementation for the ARM boot path.
- Sheet 5/10Firmware · Device TreesmzDTB
Device Tree Blob generation and parsing, from host tools to bare metal.
- Sheet 6/10Platform · GraphicsmzVKI
A thin, honest wrapper around the Vulkan API.
- Sheet 7/10Platform · WindowingmzWin
Create a window on any OS through one abstract API.
- Sheet 8/10UI Libraryzui3d
A retained-immediate-mode 2D/3D UI layout library in pure C.
- Sheet 9/10Driver · Software VulkanmzVolk
A software implementation of Vulkan. No GPU required.
- Sheet 10/10Driver · Shader JITmzJIT
A SPIR-V JIT that makes software shading respectably fast.
Proof of concept — this panel has no GPU
Software all the way down
The wireframe on the right is not drawn by your graphics card. Every frame is rotated, projected, and rasterized line-by-line on your CPU — the same idea that powers mzVolk, a full software implementation of Vulkan, and mzJIT, the SPIR-V JIT that makes it fast.
mzVolk shades pixels in SIMD lanes through JIT-compiled fragment shaders — SSE on x86_64, NEON on Apple silicon — and splits the framebuffer into row bands across worker threads. The Vulkan loader picks it up like any hardware driver. Machines without a GPU stop being second-class citizens.
rasterizer: cpu (js) · bresenham into imagedata · — ms/frame