While browsing CES 2026 announcements, I came across an interesting systems design: a USB-sized device that runs a full operating system on the hardware itself.
Instead of using a VM or container, the OS executes entirely on the device. When plugged into a phone or PC, the host only provides display and input. There’s no cloud dependency by default, and the trust boundary is shifted away from the host OS.
This raises some questions from an engineering perspective:
How would you evaluate the attack surface compared to VM-based isolation?
Where do performance and I/O become bottlenecks?
In what scenarios would this be meaningfully better than a hardened host OS?
I’m less interested in the product itself and more in the architectural tradeoffs this approach highlights.
(Background link from CES: https://plugos.net/news/2026/01/08/plugos-at-ces.html
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