Notable Projects

This page maintains a list of operating system projects considered to be notable. An operating system is considered notable if it has received some form of success outside of the relatively tiny sphere of hobby operating system development (e.g. has had a full release, is self-hosting, has been reported on outside of the hobby OSdev world, etc.) or if it has achieved such notability within the operating system development community as a useful answer to the question, "I want to see what kind of operating systems you guys have built"

If you believe your project meets one or more of the criteria above, feel free to add it to the list. The worst that could happen is you fall out of notability due to inactivity.

Everyone is welcome to add their own projects to the regular Projects list of all hobbyist operating systems

Active Notable Alternative Operating Systems

9front Plan9front (or 9front) is a fork of the Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating system. The project was started to remedy a perceived lack of devoted development resources inside Bell Labs, and has accumulated various fixes and improvements.

http://lists.9front.org/ Open source http://lists.9front.org/ Unknown Active (2018-12-21)

BareMetal BareMetal is a 64-bit OS for x86-64 based computers. The OS is written entirely in Assembly while applications can be written in Assembly or C/C++. The two main purposes of BareMetal are for educational uses in learning low-level OS programming in 64-bit Assembly and to be used as a base for a high-speed data processing node. Source code is well documented and freely available. As of version 0.4.9 BareMetal OS officially supports multiple processors, memory management, and Ethernet communications.

Ian Seyler (ian.seyler at returninfinity.com) Open source (MIT) http://www.returninfinity.com/ Unknown Active (2018-03-06)

FreeDOS Today, FreeDOS is ideal for anyone who wants to bundle a version of DOS without having to pay a royalty for use of DOS. FreeDOS will also work on old hardware and embedded systems. FreeDOS is also an invaluable resource for people who would like to develop their own operating system. While there are many free operating systems out there, no other free DOS-compatible operating system exists.

The mailing lists at http://www.freedos.org/lists/ Open source (GNU GPLv2) http://www.freedos.org Unknown Active (2018-08-24)

Ghost OS A homemade operating system with a microkernel for the IA32 (x86) platform. The project is written in C++ and Assembly. Features: multiprocessor- & multitasking support, kernel API library, custom C library, ELF support, IPC (messages, signals, shared memory, pipes), VFS, window server & GUI with homemade toolkit, PS/2 keyboard & mouse driver, VESA video driver and more...

Max Schlüssel (lokoxe@gmail.com) GPLv3 https://ghostkernel.org/ Unknown December 17, 2018 -- 0.5.6b Active (2019-02-25)

Kolibri OS Kolibri OS was a fork of the 32-bit version of Menuet OS but has changed much along the way. Despite fitting on a standard 1.44 MB floppy, this wonderful OS contains: the complete GUI desktop, a lot of drivers and great software (such as web browser and music player), system programs and games! The Kernel and most applications, libraries and drivers are written in FASM, but some are in C-- (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-- ; link to their C-- compiler: http://c--sphinx.narod.ru/). At this OS you can write the ASM code and execute it after assembling. Source code is open - http://websvn.kolibrios.org/listing.php?repname=Kolibri+OS - and the contributions are welcome!

The Kolibri OS team Open source (GNU GPLv2) http://www.kolibrios.org Unknown Active (2018-12-07)

KnightOS Open-source operating system for Texas Instruments calculators. Features preemptive multitasking, memory management, etc. Written in z80 assembly.

Drew DeVault (sir at cmpwn.com) No License Information http://knightos.org Unknown Active (2018-11-11)

Haiku Fully featured open source operating system inspired by the commercial Be Operating System. Has a preemptive, modular kernel, nearly complete POSIX compatibility, a nice (non-X11-based) GUI, and a wide variety of ported and native applications (including a WebKit based browser). Nearly the entire operating system is written in C++98 (including the kernel), albeit with little usage of exceptions.

haiku-development [at] freelists.org Open source (MIT) https://www.haiku-os.org/ Unknown Latest release: 2018-09-28, is active

LK (Little Kernel) An open source embedded multiprocessor kernel for ARM, x86, x86-64. Other platforms are work-in-progress and are in various stages of development with varying activity.

Travis Geiselbrecht (travisg at gmail.com) Open source (MIT-Style) https://github.com/littlekernel/lk Unknown Active (2018-12-19)

Managarm Managarm is a 64-bit OS for x86-64. It’s written in C++ with a custom libc and a GNU like userland on top. Managarm’s main purpose is aiming for Linux compatibility while being completely asynchronous in terms of I/O. The OS is capable of running Weston and kmscon while effort is made into porting (a subset of) Xorg. Furthermore, Managarm supports many modern hardware, including USB 3 and has nearly full ACPI support.

The official Managarm Discord server https://discord.gg/7WB6Ur3 Open source (MIT) http://www.managarm.org Unknown Active

qword Kernel and distro written in C and x86 assembly targeted at x86_64. Our philosophy is "keep it simple and make it work". KISS is love, KISS is life.

qword Discord Server https://discord.gg/z6b3qZC Open source (copyleft) https://github.com/qword-os/qword Unknown Active

SeaOS SeaOS is a hybrid kernel with loadable modules that supports ATA, AHCI, EXT2, ELF, and many other fancy acronyms. It has basic networking support, initial VT-x support, and is self-hosting with a fairly complete unix-like userland. Designed for simplicity.

Daniel Bittman (danielbittman1 at gmail.com) No License Information http://dbittman.github.io/seaos Unknown Active Development

SerenityOS SerenityOS is a graphical Unix-like OS written in C++. It combines a 1990's style GUI with a modern CLI. Everything is from scratch, including a web browser with JavaScript and HTTPS support. A growing number of 3rd party packages are available as optional ports, including GCC, bash, vim, Python, SDL2, etc. You can watch videos of the system being developed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AndreasKling.

Andreas Kling, kling [at] serenityos [dot] org Open source (BSD 2-clause) https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity Unknown Last commit: Recently

Sortix 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.

https://sortix.org/ Open source (ISC) https://sortix.org/ Unknown March 28, 2016 -- 1.0

とあるOS (ToAruOS) 32-bit modular kernel written in C. Supports pipes, shared memory, signals, POSIX-compliant file access, threading, audio, IPv4. Heavy focus on advanced GUI, including a compositing window system.

#toaruos on irc.freenode.net NCSA/University of Illinois License http://toaruos.org/ Unknown August 2, 2017 -- 1.2.1 (Active)

Visopsys Visopsys (VISual OPerating SYStem) is an alternative operating system for PC-compatible computers, written “from scratch”, and developed primarily by a single hobbyist programmer since 1997. Its primary "useful feature" is a reasonably functional partition management program - the ‘Disk Manager’, which can create, format, delete, resize, defragment, copy, and move partitions, and modify their attributes. It supports both DOS/MBR and UEFI partition tables. It can also copy hard disks, and has a simple and friendly graphical interface. A basic version can fit on a bootable floppy disk, or you can use the entire system from a ‘live’ CD/DVD

https://visopsys.org/about/ Open source (GNU GPLv2) http://visopsys.org/ Unknown Active (2018-09-08)

Vanadium OS Vanadium OS is a multi-user Unix-like OS. i386, amd64. Fully protected mode. Memory, file and hardware protection. root and unprivileged users. GUI without X, modular kernel, and has a live floppy image with a single user mode! My homepage: http://www.durlej.net/contact ; project pages: http://www.durlej.net/v/ , http://www.durlej.net/nameless , https://github.com/p-durlej/newsys . One of the great features is that you can write C code and instantly compile it to execute

Piotr Durlej, http://www.durlej.net/contact Open source (BSD 2-clause) https://github.com/p-durlej/newsys Unknown Latest release: 2018-02-13, is active