Requirements

Sinty OS is built for modern PCs. Because it verifies and encrypts the system by design, some of these requirements are not optional: the machine has to be able to boot a signed image and to hold a key in hardware.

Firmware and CPU

• UEFI firmware with Secure Boot. Sinty OS boots a signed image through a UEFI loader; legacy BIOS boot is not supported.
• 64-bit x86 (x86_64) CPU, at least the x86-64-v2 baseline. In practice that means roughly a 2009-or-newer processor (SSE4.2). Older CPUs are not supported and will refuse to run parts of the system.

Other architectures (ARM, RISC-V) are a direction for the underlying deployment engine, but Sinty OS itself targets x86_64 today.

Security hardware (TPM)

• A TPM 2.0 is currently required. It is what seals your encryption key to the machine so your data is bound to that specific device.
• The best experience is a firmware TPM built into the CPU (AMD Pluton on Ryzen 6000 and newer, recent Intel, or Qualcomm), which resists physical bus-sniffing attacks. A discrete TPM 2.0 chip also works.

Note

A machine with no TPM at all is meant, by design, to fall back to a PIN-only mode (no hardware sealing). That graceful fallback is not wired up in the current build, which requires a working TPM. See Hardware security and the TPM.

Disk

• A disk Sinty OS can partition with a GPT layout: a small EFI System Partition, the signed system slots, and an encrypted data area.
• The installer writes the whole layout, so the target disk is erased. Back up anything you care about first.

Storage and memory

Sinty OS is a lean system, but it runs a full Wayland desktop. A machine with a few GB of RAM and a modern SSD is comfortable. Precise minimums will be published with the first release.