Questions people ask about running our own software on Rigol DHO800, DHO900 and MHO900 oscilloscopes.
No. NovaOS uses no option codes, licence files, key generators or patches to Rigol's software. It is a separate operating system, Linux 6.12 with our own acquisition engine, that drives the scope's FPGA and front end directly. Because nothing is gated in software, what you get is what the hardware can do.
Rigol's firmware stays on the scope exactly as it was.
The DHO800/DHO900 family (DHO802 to DHO924) and the MHO900 family (MHO934, MHO954, MHO984). They share a Rockchip RK3399 with an FPGA over PCIe. We develop and measure on a DHO924S and an MHO934, and confirm other models on real hardware before listing them.
Yes. Stock stays installed. Switching is one menu item on the scope. You can make NovaOS the power-on default and keep stock as the fallback, or the other way round.
NovaOS reads every factory calibration file the scope carries and never writes them: the calibration partition is mounted read-only. On the MHO its own self-calibration, which brings the ADC interleave spurs below stock's, is stored separately and kept across updates.
The Rockchip 6.12 BSP kernel (Linux 6.12.112) with a small Yocto and systemd system; the scope software is written in Rust. Stock is Android 7.1 on Linux 4.4. A current kernel brings years of fixes and drivers, and our system boots to a live trace in about 12 seconds from kernel start.
The newest stable kernel today is 7.2. NovaOS runs 6.12.112 on purpose: 6.12 is a long-term kernel that kernel.org supports until December 2028, and it is the newest kernel in Rockchip's BSP that comes with the Mali vendor GPU driver (libmali). We tested the open-source Panfrost driver on these scopes and the vendor driver performed better, and the UI's speed depends on it.
When Rockchip supports a newer kernel with its Mali driver, NovaOS will follow. Until then, 6.12 gets its upstream fixes for years to come.
The kernel port is our own work: Rockchip's latest BSP merged with the current 6.12 long-term release, with the board support for these scopes written by us, not taken from another board's kernel. That way the scopes get Rockchip's drivers and the upstream security fixes together.
Every package in the image is listed with its version and licence on What's inside NovaOS, generated from each release's build records: the kernel, the Yocto-built system, the Rust toolchain and crates, and the one vendor binary (the Mali GPU's userspace driver). Source for the GPL and LGPL parts, including our kernel changes, is provided with each release, or on request at [email protected] until the published source archive is up.
Nearly all of them. NovaOS answers Rigol's SCPI command set on the same port, plus VXI-11, LXI and Rigol's Webcontrol. Its own features, such as the density display, eye and jitter or the extra decoders, are under :NOVAos. Our MCP server, dho-mcp, lets AI assistants such as Claude drive the scope: describe, identify, measure with statistics and units, capture, decode, eye and jitter, with calibration and reset commands refused and every change reported and undoable.
The 16-channel logic analyzer, its decoders and triggers are implemented on both families; the hardware test with a real PLA2216 probe starts as soon as ours arrives.
His Orange-Rigol project and kernels showed these scopes can run a full Debian or Ubuntu, and inspired this one. NovaOS goes the other way round: a complete replacement scope stack, so the scope stays a scope, just faster and with more in it.
Not yet; it runs on our own units every day. We would like to hear which model you have, what you want, and what you would consider fair: [email protected].