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BSD and Linux are not the only ones
Amoeba is a powerful microkernel-based system that turns a collection of workstations or single-board computers into a transparent distributed system.
It has been in use in academia, industry, and government for about 5 years.
It runs on the SPARC (Sun4c and Sun4m), the 386/486, 68030, and Sun 3/50 and Sun 3/60.
The AROS Research Operating System is a lightweight, efficient, and flexible desktop operating system, designed to help you make the most of your computer.
It is an independent, portable and free project, aiming at being compatible with AmigaOS at the API level (like Wine, unlike UAE), while improving on it in many areas.
The source code is available under an open source license, which allows anyone to freely improve upon it.
Barrelfish is a new research operating system being built from scratch and released by ETH Zurich in Switzerland.
We are exploring how to structure an OS for future multi-core and many-core systems.
We are motivated by two closely related trends in hardware design: first, the growing number of cores, which leads to a scalability challenge, and second, the increasing diversity in computer hardware, requiring the OS to manage and exploit heterogeneous hardware resources.
cqwrteur's fork of Linux kernel, rename it to Cinux
Stay tuned for this system!
FreeBSD is an operating system for a variety of platforms which focuses on features, speed, and stability.
It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley.
It is developed and maintained by a large community.
FreeRTOS is a market-leading embedded system RTOS supporting 40+ processor architectures with a small memory footprint, fast execution times, and cutting-edge RTOS features and libraries including Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP), a thread-safe TCP stack with IPv6 support, and seamless integration with cloud services.
It is open-source and actively supported and maintained.
Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing.
Inspired by the BeOS, Haiku is fast, simple to use, easy to learn and yet very powerful.
HelenOS is a portable microkernel-based multiserver operating system designed and implemented from scratch.
It decomposes key operating system functionality such as file systems, networking, device drivers and graphical user interface into a collection of fine-grained user space components that interact with each other via message passing.
A failure or crash of one component does not directly harm others.
HelenOS is therefore flexible, modular, extensible, fault tolerant and easy to understand.
HelenOS is funded by the Charles University (Univerzita Karlova) of the Czech Republic.
GNU Mach is the microkernel upon which a GNU Hurd system is based.
It provides an Inter Process Communication (IPC) mechanism that the Hurd uses to define interfaces for implementing in a distributed multi-server fashion the services a traditional operating system kernel provides.
KolibriOS is a tiny yet incredibly powerful and fast operating system.
This power requires only a few megabyte disk space and 8MB (eight megabytes) of RAM to run.
KolibriOS features a rich set of applications that include word processor, image viewer, graphical editor, internet browser and well over 30 exciting games.
Full FAT12/16/32 support is implemented, as well as read-only support for NTFS, exFAT, ISO9660 and Ext2/3/4.
Drivers are written for popular sound, network and graphics cards.
Microkernels are minimal but highly flexible kernels. Both conventional and non-classical operating systems can be built on top or adapted to run on top of them. Microkernel-based architectures should particularly support extensibility and customizability, robustness including reliability and fault tolerance, protection and security. After disastrous results in the early 90's, the microkernel approach now seems to be promising, although it still bears a lot of research risks.
The L4Ka research project aims at substantiating and establishing a new methodology for system construction that helps to manage ever-increasing OS complexity and minimizes legacy dependence. Our vision is a microkernel technology that can be and is used advantageously for constructing any general or customized operating system including pervasive systems, deep-computing systems, and huge servers.
The L4Re Microkernel, alias Fiasco, is a 3rd-generation microkernel (µ-kernel).
The L4Re Microkernel can be used to construct flexible systems. The microkernel is the base for the L4Re system which supports running real-time, time-sharing and virtualization applications concurrently on one system. The L4Re Microkernel is both suitable for big and complex systems as well as small, embedded applications.
We have developed the L4Re Operating System Framework which provides the necessary infrastructure on top of the microkernel for conveniently developing applications.
3rd-generation microkernels use the state-of-the-art security concept of object capabilities that implements the principle of least authority (POLA) for every address space. This allows fine-grained access control to resources throughout the system. Resources on this level are microkernel objects, memory pages and communication channels upon which user-level infrastructure is built.
The L4/x86 µ-kernel has been developed by Jochen Liedtke at GMD, IBM Watson Research Center, and Universität Karlsruhe.
Together with Fiasco, the L4/x86 µ-kernel forms the basis of the DROPS operating systems project which supports running real-time and time-sharing applications concurrently on one computer.
To support standard time-sharing applications, we have created L4Linux, a Linux server for L4 which can be run using a standard Linux distribution on L4/x86 without recompiling anything. L4Linux runs in user mode as an application program on top of L4/x86.
L3 is a microkernel running on i386, i486 and Pentium processors which has been developed by Jochen Liedtke and others at GMD's SET institute.
As its successor L4, L3 is very lean and features fast, message-based, synchronous IPC, simple-to-use external paging mechanisms and a security mechanism based on secure domains (tasks, clans and chiefs).
Additionally, L3 implements system-wide persistency. ACI distributes a complete L3 operating system running on the L3 µ-kernel, featuring DOS emulation and an ELAN runtime system.
MenuetOS is an operating system in development for PC, written completely in 64bit assembly language.
Features include pre-emptive and real-time multitasking with multiprocessor support and Graphical User Interface.
Menuet64 (2005) is released under License and Menuet32 (2000) under GPL.
Menuet supports assembly programming for much faster, smaller and has application that tend consume lesser resources.
Menuet is not based on other operating system nor has it roots within UNIX or the POSIX standards.
The design goal has been to remove the extra layers between different parts of an OS, which normally complicate programming and create bugs.
MINIX 3 is a free, open-source, operating system designed to be highly reliable, flexible, and secure.
It is based on a tiny microkernel running in kernel mode with the rest of the operating system running as a number of isolated, protected, processes in user mode.
It runs on x86 and ARM CPUs, is compatible with NetBSD, and runs thousands of NetBSD packages.
NewOS is a open source operating system with an emphasis on design and portability.
It is largely implemented in C/C++, with a small amount of assembly.
Currently, the system is mostly a kernel with a minimal amount of user space libraries and applications. Thus far, most of the work has been put into the kernel and other underlying support.
As a result the system is not that interesting from an end-user point of view (no graphics, simple commands on a command line), but that can change given a moderate amount of work by the maintainers or any volunteers.
Phantom - forward-thinking concept of OS that is not Linux derived.
Your program will survive OS reboot. All the variables are now.. like files?
And it does not cost you an arm and a leg.
Plan 9 is a research system originally developed at Bell Labs starting in the late 1980s.
Its original designers and authors were Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, and Phil Winterbottom.
They were joined by many others as development continued throughout the 1990s and 2000s. In March 2021, Nokia Bell Labs transferred the copyright of all Plan 9 software to the Plan 9 Foundation, in order continue the work from Bell Labs for new generations.
Redox is a Unix-like general-purpose microkernel-based operating system written in Rust, aiming to bring the innovations of Rust to a modern microkernel, a full set of programs and be a complete alternative to Linux and BSD.
Sortix is a small self-hosting operating-system aiming to be a clean and modern POSIX implementation.
It is a hobbyist operating system written from scratch with its own base system, including kernel and standard library, as well as ports of third party software. It has a straightforward installer and can be developed under itself. Releases come with the source code in /src, ready for tinkering.
It has been in development since February 08 2011 by a single developer and contributors. The latest nightly builds are a stable and capable server platform, a powerful development platform, and a simple desktop solution. The system is still young and future releases will add missing features such as SMP and USB support.
TempleOS (formerly J Operating System, LoseThos, and previously SparrowOS) is a biblical-themed lightweight operating system (OS) designed to be the Third Temple prophesied in the Bible.
It was created by the American engineer Mr. Terry A. Davis (1969–2018), who developed it alone over the course of a decade.
The system is characterized as a modern x86-64 Commodore 64, using an interface similar to a mixture of DOS and Turbo C.
It was programmed with an original variation of C/C++ (named HolyC) in place of BASIC, and included an original flight simulator, compiler, and kernel.
First released in 2005 as J Operating System, TempleOS was renamed in 2013 and was last updated in 2017.
XNU is an acronym for X is Not Unix.
XNU is a hybrid kernel combining the Mach kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University with components from FreeBSD and a C++ API for writing drivers called IOKit.
XNU runs on x86_64 and ARM64 for both single processor and multi-processor configurations.
Do you know of other kernel projects?
Contact me on XMPP.