Vigil

Vigil is a global resource-oriented compute fabric for sovereign and high-latency environments. It descends architecturally from 1060 NetKernel and the resource-oriented computing (ROC) tradition: clients issue requests against URIs that name abstract resources, and a kernel resolves each request to an endpoint that produces an immutable representation. Plan 9’s everything is a file and the 9P namespace are co-influences in the same family. Built on Rust, RustFS, and Apache DataFusion, Vigil embeds computation directly inside the storage layer — turning persistence into active, addressable resources.

Core design

Arena-style immutable storage. Following Venti’s model, data is written once into fixed-size, append-only arenas. Content is addressed by cryptographic hash, providing inherent integrity and perfect reproducibility. Arenas can be independently replicated, backed up, or moved between sites. Because every representation is content-addressed and immutable, caching becomes an architectural property of the system rather than a per-component concern — a direct consequence of applying ROC discipline to physical storage.

Resource-oriented computing. Following 1060 NetKernel: data, queries, transformations, and compute operations all share a single URI namespace and a single resolution mechanism. The kernel maps a request URI onto an endpoint; the endpoint produces an immutable representation. Endpoints compose through pipelines and grammars rather than direct calls, so adding a new transform — a new query language, a new materialization, a new analytic — registers an endpoint instead of re-wiring callers. DataFusion is the workhorse endpoint family: it runs queries against the resolved inputs directly at rest, no marshalling layer in between.

Federated Reach integration. Vigil securely ingests high-fidelity events from any number of Reach instances. Single-site deterministic actor streams are materialized into Vigil as versioned, URI-addressable resources with full provenance, and become first-class inputs to any endpoint that can resolve them.

Cryptographic access control. Every resource is protected by a composite-order, decentralized, multi-authority attribute-based encryption scheme (Datta–Komargodski–Waters, 2022) supporting fully-adaptive security under dynamic authority corruption. Access policy travels with the URI, not with the wire.

CRDT-based federation. Conflict-free replicated data types, optimized for append-only physical event streams, enable reliable replication across high-latency, intermittent, air-gapped, or orbital deployments. Resource identity (the hash) is invariant across sites, so a request resolved against any replica returns the same representation as a request resolved at the origin.

Position in the architecture

Where Reach provides fast, deterministic local plumbing inside a single facility, Vigil federates those facilities into a coherent, programmable whole — no matter how far apart or disconnected they may be. Vigil is the slow, semantically rich, cryptographically hardened global cortex of the weathership architecture: ROC’s URI-addressable abstraction stretched over Venti’s content-addressable substrate.

The project is in active, early development and will be released under the Apache 2.0 license.