Databases Without an OS? Meet QuinineHM and the New Generation of Data Software

For the last few years, we've been building the new generation of data software infrastructure.

Today, we're finally ready to show it.

This is Alpha - tuned for stability, not yet full throttle - and it's completely free to use, explore, and break.

Why We Built This

Because we were tired of how broken data software had become - expensive, slow, and inconsistent.

It's not hard to see why this is needed. Developers everywhere complain about cost, latency, and unpredictable performance.

And the cost? Outrageous. Spinning up a single PostgreSQL instance on AWS - 1 vCPU and 1 GB of RAM for $90/month - borders on absurd. We can do better than that.

Then there's security - or the lack of it. Every month brings another critical CVE. Redis just got hit with a 10/10 vulnerability. The pattern never ends: more complexity, more patches, more risk.

The deeper we dug, the more we realized the real bottleneck wasn't the database software itself - it was the operating system underneath it. Every I/O call, every context switch, every kernel scheduling decision was silently taxing performance. That's what led us to the idea of a new foundation: a hardware manager purpose-built for data workloads.

So we decided to start rebuilding.

What's Wrong With Operating Systems?

Operating systems were designed in a different era - when a "computer" was a desktop or a mainframe, not a hyperscale database server.

They evolved to run anything: browsers, games, spreadsheets, daemons, shells. That flexibility made them universal - but it also buried every high-performance workload under layers of abstraction it doesn't need.

Every syscall, every scheduler context switch, every background process steals a little bit of your machine's performance.

For decades, we've tried to patch and tune around those losses - NUMA balancing, kernel-bypass networking, lock-free schedulers - but at some point, you simply run out of optimizations like that.

So we stopped optimizing. We started over.

Introducing the Hardware Manager

Imagine booting a machine without an operating system. No kernel. No init system. No userland.

The hardware comes alive - and instead of a general-purpose OS taking over, a Hardware Manager steps in: a purpose-built layer that knows it's only ever going to run one thing - your workload.

That's QuinineHM.

It's not a unikernel. It's not a microkernel. It's something entirely new - a minimal, deterministic layer that:

• Boots the hardware
• Manages CPUs, timers, and devices
• Provides a high-speed TCP/IP stack
• Exposes the hardware directly to the software
• And then gets out of the way

That's it. No userspace. No background processes. No arbitrary code execution.

The database isn't hosted on QuinineHM - it's integrated with it. They're fused at the lowest possible level, so the software can control how the hardware behaves, not just request resources from it.

Imagine having full control over physical memory, cache lines, and CPU cores - total ownership of where and how your code executes. You don't have to imagine anymore. That's exactly what QuinineHM enables.

Traditional Database Stack vs. Dataware Stack

The key difference: no boundaries between software and hardware management.

So How Does This Change Things?

Traditional systems are designed around the idea that multiple unrelated processes need to safely share hardware. That assumption drives everything: preemptive multitasking, virtual memory, kernel isolation, page faults, scheduler fairness, etc. But in a dedicated data system, none of that is necessary.

QuinineHM replaces that complexity with direct, cooperative control between the hardware and the application. Instead of requesting resources and communicating via an OS, the software can directly access and use hardware, however it likes.

Here's what that changes in practice:

In other words, it transforms a general-purpose server into a platform where software can directly leverage the hardware to its full potential. Every CPU cycle, cache line, and memory page serves a single workload - yours.

Why Should You Care

Because performance and security are both consequences of complexity - and QuinineHM removes most of it.

With QuinineHM, our software runs on the metal, not above it. The result: a system that's faster, simpler, and safer.

Traditional operating systems treat every process as a potentially malicious one. That's why they're full of abstractions, safeguards, and limitations:

• Preemptive multitasking? Needed to protect against rogue processes.
• Complex memory management (virtual memory, page lookaside buffers, caches)? Defensive isolation.
• Restricted hardware access (no fixed CPU control, context switching, cache management)? Another security measure.
• Kernel ↔ user space context switches on every syscall? Required because everything in userspace is untrusted by default.

But for a new generation of data infrastructure, we know exactly what's running - we wrote it, and we trust it. That means we can safely remove all of that defensive machinery and unlock maximum performance and security.

Security improves because there's almost nothing left to exploit. Performance improves because there's nothing left in the way. It's not just a faster engine - it's an entirely new kind of vehicle.

Introducing the First Products

• TonicDB - a Redis-compatible, in-memory database that runs directly on QuinineHM. Up to 2000% faster and far more efficient than anything running on a traditional OS.
• TonicMesh - orchestration and management for distributed TonicDB clusters. Scale globally, monitor performance in real time, and stay in full control.
• Dataware Cloud - the simplest way to deploy. Fully managed hosting for all Dataware products.

And this is just the beginning. The Dataware ecosystem is designed to grow - we plan to expand this foundation to include NoSQL databases, Kafka-compatible pipelines, search engines, vector databases, graph databases, etc. All built on the same bare-metal architecture that powers everything we've shared today.

How It All Fits Together

The Dataware Stack is what happens when you rebuild the entire database stack from the bottom up:

When you run TonicDB, you're not starting a process - you're booting an architecture.

Single Node Architecture

This tight coupling eliminates layers of indirection that traditional databases suffer under.

What Makes It Different

This is what we mean by bare-metal computing:

• No syscall boundaries between you and the hardware
• No scheduler interference - your database owns its CPU cores
• No random kernel daemons waking up in the background
• No generic memory allocator overhead
• Your CPU, cache, and memory belong entirely to your workload
• Direct I/O control, without abstraction layers

It's the difference between running on the highway and owning the highway.

Alpha Access

This is our Alpha release. Performance is intentionally tuned down while we prioritize stability and feedback - but the architecture is real, live, and already outperforming traditional stacks by orders of magnitude in internal tests.

It's free to use while in alpha whitelist mode, and we want engineers, systems hackers, and database enthusiasts to play with it, stress it, and tell us what breaks.

Final Thought

For half a century, the operating system has been the unquestioned foundation of computing. We think it's time to ask what comes next.

QuinineHM isn't an incremental improvement. It's a new category: the first Hardware Manager - designed for a world where raw performance and uncompromising security aren't luxuries, but requirements.

We believe this marks the beginning of a new era of computing - where databases, servers, and distributed systems finally run at the speed of the hardware they live on.

Welcome to bare-metal computing.