中文日本語

About

Who makes keelOS, and what you can rely on

keelOS runs as root on your server and holds all of your VMs. Before you trust it with that, you should know who makes it, what it sends out, and what happens to your data if the project stops.

Who makes it

keelOS is an independent project, built since September 2026 on FreeBSD, bhyve and OpenZFS. It is not open source and it is free to use (see the licence below).

  • Bugs, questions and hardware reports: GitHub Issues.
  • Releases and release notes: GitHub Releases.
  • There is no forum or chat group yet. When there is one, it will be listed here.

If the project stops, your data does not

Nothing in keelOS stores your VMs in a format only keelOS can read.

  • Disks are ZFS volumes (zvols) or plain image files in an ordinary ZFS pool called zones, one dataset per VM. Any current OpenZFS system (FreeBSD, Linux, TrueNAS, Proxmox VE) can zpool import zones and read them.
  • A zvol is a raw disk. Copy it with dd or zfs send, attach it to a Proxmox VM with qm disk import, or point bhyve or QEMU at /dev/zvol/zones/….
  • VM settings are one readable JSON file per VM (CPUs, memory, disks, network cards with their MAC addresses, firmware). The host settings are JSON and FreeBSD rc.conf files on the boot partition.
  • The guests use standard devices (virtio, NVMe, AHCI, e1000), so they boot on another hypervisor with the drivers they already have. A Windows guest with BitLocker asks for its recovery key when it moves to a new virtual TPM, as it would on any platform: keep that key.

What it sends over the network

  • No telemetry, no account, no update check. keelOS opens no connection to us or anyone else on its own.
  • It downloads something only when you give it an address: an installer ISO for a VM, or an upgrade image.
  • On your local network it announces itself by mDNS, so that https://<hostname>.local/ works.
  • This website has no tracking scripts.

Checking an image

Each release lists the SHA-256 checksum of its ISO next to the download. The upgrade page of the web interface shows the SHA-256 of the image you upload or download, so you can compare it before you switch to it. Release images are not signed yet; when they are, the public key will be published on this page.

Security model

  • The hypervisor is small. The part that holds guest memory and owns the IOMMU is about 100 KB. The FreeBSD host runs from a read-only image in RAM; an upgrade replaces the whole image.
  • The first person to open the web interface sets the administrator password. Install keelOS on a network you trust and set the password straight away. It is also the password for SSH (root) and for RDP to the VM consoles; before it is set, SSH accepts keys only. keel admin reset on the local console clears it.
  • The web interface and the API use HTTPS with a certificate the host makes for itself (its SHA-256 fingerprint is in the host's log). Everything the web interface does goes through the same API.
  • Tokens are scoped. Each API token says what it may do, on which VMs, from which addresses and until when. Every change is written to the audit log with the token that made it.

The AI assistant connection (MCP)

The MCP server is off until you create a token for it. The token is the limit: an assistant can do only what the token allows (for example: read status only, or start and stop two named VMs, from one address, for a day). The skill that comes with it tells the assistant to ask you before it stops or deletes anything, but the token, not the skill, is what keelOS enforces. Revoke the token and the assistant is out.

Licence

  • Personal use is free.
  • Commercial use is also free, with our permission; in return we list your company's name on this site.
  • The licence text and the way to ask for permission are published with the first release.
  • The licence notices of FreeBSD, bhyve, OpenZFS and the other components ship with every image.

Frequently asked questions →