Soliloquy

Soliloquy is the desktop environment and browser shell for the Alpenglow OS appliance. It owns the Rust shell, Servo integration work, V8/RV8 runtime bridge, browser chrome, UI bundle, desktop controls, and browser-facing optimization code.

The installable operating system, rootfs composition, kernel policy, service graph, board support, and netd live in ../alpenglow-os.

This project is early-stage and not production-ready.

What Is In This Repo

The root workspace currently contains these Rust packages:

• src/ - soliloquy_browser_optimizations
• src/shell/ - soliloquy-shell (desktop shell + browser)
• src/desktop/ - soliloquy-daemon (DE daemon, consumes alpenglow OS state)

Other important top-level areas:

• ui/desktop/ - Svelte desktop environment and browser chrome
• third_party/servo/ - in-tree Servo checkout used by the desktop shell flow
• docs/ - project docs for the current Cargo, Bun, Servo/RV8, and desktop paths
• tools/soliloquy/ - desktop build/dev/start helpers

Architecture Snapshot

• soliloquy-shell handles shell/runtime concerns, platform integration, and the Servo/V8 bridge
• soliloquy_browser_optimizations provides cache, memory residency, GPU, network, and V8 support modules
• soliloquy-daemon is the desktop environment daemon — reads alpenglow OS state (network, kernel), manages apps/sessions, exposes an HTTP API for the Svelte UI
• ../rv8 is the sibling experimental browser/runtime engine checkout with IPC, rendering, parsing, and JS execution paths
• ui/desktop provides the appliance desktop surface that Alpenglow stages into its image
• ../alpenglow-os owns OS packaging, install, kernel policy, rootfs generation, target-board boot, and the system daemons (alpenglow-netd, oil)

Boundary: Soliloquy consumes alpenglow-netd for state types (from ../alpenglow-os) but owns all desktop-environment concerns — windowing, browser shell, app launcher, session management, Svelte UI.

Build And Run

Rust workspace

cargo build
cargo test

Targeted packages:

cargo test -p soliloquy-shell --lib
cargo test -p soliloquy_browser_optimizations
cargo test -p soliloquy-daemon

QEMU boot (fast dev loop)

Build the Alpine-based Soliloquy image and boot it in QEMU with one command:

./start.sh                         # build + boot QEMU (headless)
./start.sh --headless              # serial console mode
./start.sh --build-only            # prepare image, skip VM

On Apple Silicon, the boot uses qemu-system-aarch64 with HVF acceleration and reaches the soliloquy-daemon in <1 second:

[    0.000000] Booting Linux on physical CPU
[    0.267349] Run /init as init process
sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
2026-06-16T05:37:24Z INFO soliloquy_daemon: listening on 127.0.0.1:9842

The image is built from ../alpenglow-os (Alpine Linux base + kernel) with the soliloquy-daemon binary cross-compiled for aarch64-musl and a minimal init that skips OpenRC — just mounts filesystems and starts the daemon directly.

Desktop bundle

cd ui/desktop && bun run build

Current build paths

• Cargo — local Rust desktop work
• Bun — Svelte UI bundle
• ../alpenglow-os — OS install, QEMU, kernel, image gates

Current Bridge State

• Servo has a backend selection seam controlled by SOLILOQUY_JS_ENGINE
• v8-experimental is a real mode, but unsupported work still falls back to Servo's existing mozjs path
• the current bridge covers simple literals, + expressions, structured window.__soliloquyEval(...) calls, and live snapshot-backed reads/writes for a narrow DOM surface
• the live snapshot bridge has been extracted into third_party/servo/components/servo/soliloquy_bridge.rs
• cargo test --manifest-path src/shell/Cargo.toml --lib passes locally