Every tool, built in

Nothing here is an add-on. Every application below ships on the Kernel-Loaded Desktop, wired to the same ZFS pool and the same :8443 control plane. Most open as their own native app window with the correct dock icon — not a browser tab. Browse by category; click any shot to enlarge.

The kldload GNOME application grid — Ansible, Helm, k9s, klab, Kubernetes, Metrics, Snapshot Manager, System Diagnostics, Virtual Machines, ZFS Lab, ZFS Manager, ZFS Snapshots, Talk to Bob and more
One app grid — the whole datacenter, point-and-shoot.

Appliances

Thirteen upstream projects as one-click tiles in vmxplore — Web Stack, LAMP, WriteFreely, Jellyfin, Plex, Seedbox, Icecast, SDR Station, Tvheadend, AdGuard Home, Syncthing, and the VDI and RDP desktops. Each boots as its own VM on its own ZFS pool, verified by its own checks and enrolled on the estate, and hands you a URL. A built tile clones as Firecracker microVMs in about 200 ms. The catalogue on one card →

Control plane

One URL, one TLS cert, every internal service behind it. The web UI is the front door to the whole machine.

kldload web UI dashboard on the desktop with the dock

kldload Web UI

Dock icon · https://<host>:8443

The single-pane control plane: live system overview, ZFS pools, VMs, Kubernetes, klab, metrics and the installer — all fronted by one nginx HTTP/2 TLS reverse proxy that also carries Grafana, Headlamp, k9s and the libvirt console.

Tip: every browser-based tool below is this proxy on one port — one cert to trust, not a dozen.

Storage & ZFS

The machine is ZFS-on-root. Snapshots, replication, boot environments and pool health — all point-and-shoot, no zfs syntax required.

ZFS Snapshots web UI — snapshot list with Rollback buttons

ZFS Snapshots (ksnap)

Dock icon “ZFS Snapshots” · ksnap

Every snapshot on the box with a one-click Rollback. The same engine sanoid uses for automatic 15-min / hourly / daily / monthly / yearly retention — the dense list is what “automatic” looks like after a day of uptime.

Tip: roll back a bad change in seconds — find the snapshot, click Rollback.
ZFS Manager — point-and-shoot action menu: snapshot a dataset, replicate, roll back, pool status

ZFS Manager

Dock icon “ZFS Manager”

A point-and-shoot front end for everyday pool and dataset work — snapshot a dataset, replicate, roll back, check pool status — without dropping to a shell.

Tip: the fastest way to act on a dataset from the desktop; pairs with ksnap for scripting.
ZFS Manager replicate dialog — send a dataset to a local pool or a remote host

Point-and-shoot replication

ZFS Manager → Replicate

Replicate any dataset to a second pool or a remote host in a couple of clicks — syncoid incremental send/recv underneath. Backups that are just snapshots shipped over the wire; no agent, no vendor.

Tip: point it at a peer over WireGuard for off-box backups on the schedule you choose.
ZFS boot environments web UI

Boot Environments

ZFS Manager → Boot environments

Every boot environment is a ZFS snapshot. Browse them here; pick a previous one from ZFSBootMenu at boot and you’re back in seconds — no reinstall after a bad upgrade.

Tip: a BE is taken before package transactions, so “undo that update” is a boot-menu choice.
ZFS Pool Health Grafana dashboard — capacity, fragmentation, dedup ratio, free space, ARC

ZFS Pool Health

Metrics → ZFS Pool Health

Live pool telemetry: ONLINE state, capacity, fragmentation, dedup ratio, free space, ARC size vs target, top datasets by use and compression ratio — a Grafana board fed straight from the pool.

Tip: watch ARC size vs target to see whether the box wants more RAM.

Virtualization

A KVM/libvirt hypervisor tuned for ZFS from the zvol up — every VM disk is a ZFS dataset, so snapshot, clone and replicate are native.

Virtual Machines web UI — VM list with Stop, SSH, Console, Reboot, Snap, Clone actions

Virtual Machines

Dock icon “Virtual Machines” · web UI

Inventory, networks, storage pools, per-VM Snap / Rollback / Clone, SSH and an embedded console — every VM on its own ZFS zvol. Running VMs auto-restore after a host reboot; stopped stay stopped.

Tip: Snap is scoped to that VM’s zvol only and auto-prunes to the newest 5.
VM serial console embedded in the web UI

VM Console

VMs → Console

A full serial console to any VM, embedded right in the web UI over the same ttyd session — no separate VNC client, no extra port to open.

Tip: reach a VM that lost its network straight from the dashboard.
VMs snapshots tab — automatic per-VM zvol snapshots

VM Snapshots & Clone

VMs → Snapshots

Automatic per-VM zvol snapshots on a sanoid schedule, plus instant copy-on-write clones (kvm-clone) — a second identical machine in the time it takes to type the name.

Tip: clone a VM to test a risky change, throw the clone away after.

Kubernetes

A real 1 control-plane + 3 worker cluster on ZFS-clone VMs, with a Cilium eBPF datapath and ZFS-backed persistent volumes.

Kubernetes web UI — deployments and workloads across namespaces

Kubernetes dashboard

Dock icon “Kubernetes” · web UI

Overview (Tetragon + Hubble panels), Workloads, Network (the full eBPF datapath), Storage (ZFS-backed PVCs / PVs / VolumeSnapshots), and Nodes — control plane and workers with live resources.

Tip: a VolumeSnapshot here is a zfs snapshot underneath — same snapshot story as the host.
Kubernetes workloads across all namespaces

kube-cluster

kube-cluster --workers 3

Bootstraps the whole cluster from ZFS clones: Cilium v1.16.5 in eBPF mode (no kube-proxy), Hubble, Tetragon, MetalLB, and a dual WireGuard mesh (mgmt + data planes). Tick Kubernetes at install and this runs for you.

Tip: boot to a running cluster — kubectl get nodes shows 4.
k9s terminal Kubernetes UI

k9s

Dock icon “k9s” · k9s

The terminal Kubernetes UI for fast navigation of pods, logs, exec and resource editing — embedded in the web UI via ttyd, or straight from a shell.

Tip: : then a resource (:deploy, :svc) jumps anywhere instantly.
Helm releases web UI

Helm

Dock icon “Helm” · helm

Package management for the cluster — browse repositories, install and upgrade charts against the local cluster from a desktop window.

Tip: Cilium and MetalLB are already Helm-installed — inspect with helm list -A.

Automation & Lab

Reproducible environments and configuration management — instant blue-green clone promotion and Ansible, both built in.

klab goldens — build cards for CentOS, Rocky, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL

klab — goldens

Dock icon “klab” · klab golden all

Build a golden image once per distro — CentOS, Rocky, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL — then every deployment is a ZFS clone of that exact golden (~75 ms). No re-install means no configuration drift.

Tip: “Build everything” warms all goldens so deploys are instant.
klab operations — blue/green deploy, promote, rollback, fault injection

klab — blue/green

klab → Operations

Deploy blue or green from the goldens, promote green to blue with an atomic pointer swap, roll back to a snapshot, and fire pre-built fault-injection scenarios to rehearse recovery.

Tip: klab promote green is instant and reversible — cutover without a maintenance window.
Ansible deployment ledger — playbook runs across nodes

Ansible

Dock icon “Ansible”

Run playbooks against your VMs and nodes from the desktop, with a ledger of every run. The installer bakes an admin SSH key into every install, so hosts are peer-reachable out of the box.

Tip: the baked-in key means inventory “just works” across klab goldens — no key dance.

Observability

Metrics dashboards for the whole stack, plus a realtime eBPF cockpit that turns the kernel inside out — the dev companion for testing and troubleshooting.

Metrics — Grafana fleet-at-a-glance with VMs, CPU, RAM, uptime

Metrics

Dock icon “Metrics” · web UI

Prometheus + Grafana + Tetragon, embedded: fleet-at-a-glance, per-VM and per-process panels, the Cilium datapath, ZFS ARC and pool stats, and eBPF-sourced security events — all on the :8443 proxy.

Tip: dashboards populate automatically as Cilium and node-exporter scrape — no wiring.
sysdiag — local-OS observability tmux cockpit with an F-key eBPF cheatsheet

sysdiag — eBPF cockpit

Dock icon “System Diagnostics” · kldload-sysdiag

A tmux cockpit of live eBPF (CO-RE/BTF, works on the 7.0 kernel). F-keys toggle panels: F5 disk (biosnoop/biolatency/fileslower/zfsdist), F6 syscalls (execsnoop/opensnoop/killsnoop/syscount/capable), F7 TCP (tcpconnect/tcpretrans/tcplife), F8 net, F10 ZFS, F12 bandwidth.

Tip: Alt+letter heads-up popups (uptime/memory/disk/network/ZFS) auto-dismiss on Enter — and the assistant can drive the same panels.

AI

Bob — a local, GPU-resident LLM served by Ollama. Fully offline; nothing leaves the box.

Bob — local GPU LLM assistant chat

Bob

Dock icon “Talk to Bob”

A local LLM assistant running on the GPU via Ollama, offline by design. Ask it about the system, ZFS, KVM or Kubernetes with live context — no API key, no data leaving the machine. A bobctl toggle hands the GPU back to gaming or a VM when you need the VRAM.

Tip: GPU-accelerated — answers in seconds with NVIDIA, and it can drive the sysdiag panels for you.

Desktop

GNOME on Wayland with the apps a developer actually reaches for — already installed, already configured.

Console — konsole with the kldload system panel

Console

Dock icon “Console” / Konsole

The terminal, with a kldload system panel (kernel, GPU, ZFS, IP) on tap. Navigation is one modifier per job: Alt+arrows move between panes, Alt+number jumps windows, Ctrl+Q closes a pane.

Tip: Alt+Q closes the window the same way across the whole desktop.
Export Disk Image — kexport converts an install to qcow2, VMDK, VHD, OVA, raw

Export Disk Image

Dock icon “Export Disk Image” · kexport

Turn the install into a portable image — qcow2, VMDK, VHD, OVA or raw — ZFS-on-root, WireGuard, KVM and eBPF baked in. Use it as a Packer base or a hypervisor template; cloud-init ready.

Tip: build the golden once, export it, run it anywhere.
Also in the box: Chrome (the first-class browser and the engine behind every tool window), Steam (Flathub), full NVIDIA proprietary drivers (signed akmod, Secure-Boot-capable), gvim / vim / nano / gnome-text-editor, and the full font + codec stack — a working dev-and-play environment from first boot.
For the full story on how these fit together, read The Kernel-Loaded Desktop →