ship’s manual · guide

Channel computers

The computer is not a metaphor. Every ordinary channel owns one persistent isolated Linux world.

Isolation

On Apple Silicon, 1Helm uses an Apple container machine with no Mac home mount. Linux uses one durable Podman OCI container per channel. Windows hosts all channel containers inside one installation-scoped managed WSL 2 runtime with Windows-drive automount and interop disabled. The resident command tool and channel Terminal enter the same channel container and start in the same /workspace.

Authoritative storage

OCI workspace, Files, home, and channel state live under runtime-owned storage. Files and Cowork access that storage directly, so human and agent edits are immediately visible without a whole-workspace copy step. Installed tools, background processes, filesystem state, hostname, and network identity persist across stop/start.

Managed resources

Skipper chooses CPU and memory using pressure, obligations, and recent demand. Podman applies live CPU and memory changes.

Lifecycle and recovery

Archive cancels active turns and terminals, stops the world, and creates a digest-qualified backup. Restore reuses the same world; missing OCI storage may be rebuilt only from an exact ownership-checked backup whose SHA-256 matches. Deletion and app-removal cleanup require exact installation/channel labels, mounts, and owner markers.

Clean start

This OCI generation does not bridge, migrate, copy, import, or delete retired channel runtimes or data.

Wake and repair

Follow-ups, services, systemd timers, cron, terminals, and active work prevent unsafe sleep. Reconciliation detects drift, wakes due obligations, updates guests, and repairs recoverable failures.

Platform truth

Apple Silicon macOS 26 uses Apple's pinned runtime; Ubuntu/Debian systemd hosts use native Podman; Windows 11 x64 uses one shared managed WSL 2/Podman runtime. The native compatibility backend remains an explicit development/test seam and is not the production default.