Limitations

Understand current agentOS VM limitations, unsupported features, and recommended workarounds before choosing an execution architecture.

agentOS is a Linux environment with a POSIX-compatible virtual kernel. It handles scripting, file I/O, networking, and language execution with low overhead.

Sandbox mounting

When a workload needs a full Linux OS, mount an external sandbox into the VM.

See agentOS vs Sandbox for a detailed comparison.

Limitations

Software registry

agentOS uses its own software registry of popular tools cross-compiled for the runtime. You cannot download and install arbitrary binaries (for example via curl or apt), and standard Linux package managers (apt, yum) are not available since agentOS runs a streamlined Linux environment rather than a full distribution. Native binaries that are not yet available in the registry (such as Go, Rust, or C++ toolchains) require a full external sandbox.

See Software for how to install and configure available packages.

Lightweight Linux kernel

agentOS provides a POSIX-compliant virtual Linux kernel with full filesystem operations, networking, and process management. It implements a focused subset of the kernel surface, so a few Linux-specific features are not available:

• Kernel modules and eBPF
• Container runtimes (e.g. Docker)
• File watching (inotify, fs.watch)

No hardware access

The VM has no access to GPUs, USB devices, or other hardware.