Kailash OS Guide

User and administrator guide for Kailash OS — a NixOS-based Linux distribution for AI security work: what it is, how it is built and governed, and a per-tool reference for the whole catalogue.

1 Kailash OS Guide

This book is the user and administrator guide for Kailash OS — a NixOS-based Linux distribution for AI security work. It explains what the system is, how it is built and governed, how to run it, and (as the reference section lands) how to invoke every tool in its catalogue.

The distribution’s main site is kailash.site; the guide you are reading lives at docs.kailash.tools.

1.1 How the guide is organised

• Part I — What is Kailash: the system’s purpose, the lab model it embodies, and the four-layer, 32-category taxonomy that organises its tool catalogue.
• Part II — Security & governance: how the distribution is built — declarative pins and locks, the safety classes that gate runnable tooling, and the release model that versions it.
• Part III — Tool reference: one man-style reference page per tool, generated from the tool manifest. In build — see the coverage page for the delivery plan.
• Part IV — Administrator guide: install, profile selection, updates, and regeneration of this guide itself.

1.2 Status

The guide is being built in the 2026.01 release window. Prose parts land chapter by chapter; the per-tool reference section is generated last, from the same manifest that drives the distribution’s packaging. Progress is tracked publicly on the repository’s issue tracker.