Compatibility

CephalonEngine ships with an explicit compatibility contract. The point of this page is to give you a single answer to “is this combination supported?” before you commit to it.

Shipping baseline

Item	Status
.NET 10	supported — the shipping baseline.
.NET 11	assessment-only readiness lane. Tracked publicly, not yet a support claim.
.NET 9 and earlier	unsupported. The engine API surface uses .NET 10 features.

cephalon doctor always prints the active shipping baseline plus the readiness lane status, so build agents and developer machines see the same truth.

Deployment modes

Each deployment mode has its own support claim, regardless of the .NET runtime version:

Mode	Status	Notes
Standard self-contained / framework-dependent	supported	The default. Every shipped sample runs in this mode.
Single-file	warn — outside support contract	Generated apps will publish, but reflection-based discovery requires extra config.
ReadyToRun	experimental	Not blocked, not blessed.
Trimming	warn — outside support contract	Several companion packages use unbounded reflection (EF Core, message-pipeline source-gen alternatives).
Native AOT	warn — outside support contract	Same constraints as trimming, plus source-generation gaps.

The intent is to graduate trim and AOT as packages adopt source-generated alternatives. The current per-package posture is tracked in Engine surface maturity audit.

Host compatibility

Host package	.NET target	Status
Cephalon.AspNetCore	net10.0	M3
Cephalon.AspNetCore.GraphQL	net10.0	M2
Cephalon.AspNetCore.Grpc	net10.0	M2
Cephalon.AspNetCore.JsonRpc	net10.0	M2
Cephalon.Worker	net10.0	M3

Data backend compatibility

The data abstractions are runtime-neutral; concrete adapters carry their own minimum-version claim:

Backend	Adapter	Min version
PostgreSQL	Cephalon.Data + Npgsql	14+
SQL Server	Cephalon.Data + Microsoft.Data.SqlClient	2019+
MySQL / MariaDB	Cephalon.Data + MySqlConnector	8.0 / 10.6+
Oracle Database	Cephalon.Data + Oracle.ManagedDataAccess	19c+
MongoDB	Cephalon.Data + Mongo.Driver	6.0+
Cassandra	Cephalon.Data.Cassandra	4.0+
ClickHouse	Cephalon.Data.ClickHouse	23.8+
Redis	Cephalon.Data.Redis	6.2+
Elasticsearch	Cephalon.Data.Elasticsearch	8.x
OpenSearch	Cephalon.Data.OpenSearch	2.x
Neo4j	Cephalon.Data.Neo4j	5.x
Qdrant	Cephalon.Data.Qdrant	1.7+
NATS JetStream	Cephalon.Data.Nats	2.10+

The dependency-health probes follow the same minimums.

Operating systems

OS	Status
Windows Server 2022 / 2025	supported, including Windows Service deploy target.
Windows 11 24H2+ (dev)	supported.
Ubuntu 22.04 / 24.04 LTS	supported, including systemd deploy target.
Debian 12	supported.
Alpine 3.20+	supported, used by the default container image.
RHEL 9 / Rocky 9	supported.
macOS 14+ (dev)	supported for development; not a deployment target.

Stability contract

Within a minor release of the engine (e.g. 0.1.x):

• Public API on Cephalon.Abstractions is additive.
• Companion-package public API is additive within the same M* level.
• Manifest schema bumps come with a manifest schema version increment and a migration note.
• Engine:* configuration keys are stable; new keys are additive with safe defaults.

Across minor releases (e.g. 0.1.x → 0.2.x):

• The engine version bumps. Compatibility metadata enforces that companion packages built against 0.1.x are flagged at composition time.
• Breaking changes are documented in Migration → Breaking changes with a “before / after” snippet for each affected API.
• The engineering-standards doc reviews acceptable breakage when it lands.

How to check compatibility programmatically

The runtime exposes the active contract via IRuntimeManifest and snapshot.* configuration keys:

Program.cs

var manifest = runtime.GetManifest();
Console.WriteLine(manifest.EngineVersion);          // "0.1.0-preview"
Console.WriteLine(manifest.ManifestSchemaVersion);  // "v2"
Console.WriteLine(manifest.DeploymentMode.Baseline); // "net10.0"

And from the CLI:

cephalon doctor --json | jq '.deploymentMode'

Where to go next

• Migration → .NET versions — the .NET 11 readiness lane in detail.
• Reference → Architecture → Conformance matrix — the per-package source of truth.
• Guide → Operations — what to monitor in production.