Hadron Linux

The foundational Linux distribution for the cloud and the edge.

Hadron delivers a minimal, trustworthy operating system built from the ground up with vanilla upstream components. Engineered for security, flexibility, and reliability.

Hadron is Engineered by Spectro Cloud from the Kairos team.

Why Hadron?

Minimal & Lean: Bare essentials only—no bloat, just what you need
Trusted Boot: Secure boot environments with modern security standards
Upstream First: Built with vanilla components, staying close to upstream
Edge & Cloud Ready: Optimized for both cloud workloads and edge deployments
Seamless Updates: A/B upgrade capabilities for zero-downtime operations

Architecture

Hadron is a Linux Distribution built from scratch with a focus on minimalism and staying close to upstream sources:

Core Components: Built on musl libc, systemd init system, and vanilla Linux kernels
Boot Methods: Supports both Trusted Boot (via USI/UKI) and standard boot (via Dracut/GRUB)
Upgrade System: Managed via Kairos agent for A/B style atomic upgrades
Upstream Alignment: Minimal patches, maximum compatibility with upstream projects
Simple and no vendor-lock-in: Hadron doesn't ship a package manager by default, and it's not based on any other Linux distribution. You can build packages on top of Hadron, or use the package manager you like.

Development

To build locally the image, you just need to have Docker installed, clone the repository and run:

make build

To create an ISO, you can:

make devel-iso

And you can run it in a VM with:

make run-qemu

There is some args that you can pass to the make command to customize the build:

BOOTLOADER: Choose between grub (default) or systemd for Trusted Boot
KERNEL_TYPE: Choose between default or cloud. Cloud is a minimal kernel built for VM/cloud environments. Default is a more generic kernel with more drivers included.
KUBERNETES_DISTRO: Choose between k3s, k0s or leave empty for no Kubernetes distribution
KUBERNETES_VERSION: Specify the Kubernetes version to install (if KUBERNETES_DISTRO is set)
VERSION: Specify the version tag for the built image (default is latest)
ARCH: Specify the target architecture (default is amd64, choices are amd64 or arm64)
FIPS: Set to fips to build with FIPS support (default is no-fips)

Building Kairos Images

Note: The following examples are for testing purposes only. The Dockerfile used for building Kairos images is automatically fetched from the kairos repository and should not be modified locally.

Building a Core Kairos Image

To build a core Kairos image (without Kubernetes distribution) based on Hadron:

# Pull the base Hadron image and build the Kairos image
make pull-image build-kairos BOOTLOADER=grub VERSION=v0.0.1

# Or for Trusted Boot:
make pull-image build-kairos BOOTLOADER=systemd VERSION=v0.0.1

This will:

Fetch the latest Dockerfile from the kairos repository
Build a core Kairos image named hadron-init based on the Hadron base image
Use the specified bootloader (grub or systemd) and version

Building a Standard Image with Kubernetes

To build a standard image with a Kubernetes distribution (e.g., k3s or k0s):

# Build with k3s
make pull-image build-kairos BOOTLOADER=grub VERSION=v0.0.1 KUBERNETES_DISTRO=k3s

# Build with k0s
make pull-image build-kairos BOOTLOADER=grub VERSION=v0.0.1 KUBERNETES_DISTRO=k0s

# Optionally specify Kubernetes version
make pull-image build-kairos BOOTLOADER=grub VERSION=v0.0.1 KUBERNETES_DISTRO=k3s KUBERNETES_VERSION=v1.28.0

After building the Kairos image, you can create an ISO:

# For GRUB bootloader
make grub-iso

# For Trusted Boot
make trusted-iso

License

Apache 2.0

Acknowledgements

https://github.com/firasuke/mussel For making things even easier than musl-cross-make with mussel. It was so plug-n-play that felt like a really nice experience right from the start.
https://github.com/openembedded/openembedded-core/tree/master/meta/recipes-core/systemd which makes possible to build systemd on top of musl
https://github.com/mocaccinoOS/mocaccino-micro For inspiration on how to build a musl system from scratch

Hadron

Install / Use

README