Nicheloom visits: 58,094 all-time · 7,637 in the last 7 days

The opportunity tracker for new startups.

Today: 1,953 launches · Niche of the day: specialized calculation tools · See what launched today →

Anos

a hand-written ~100KiB microkernel for x86-64 and RISC-V

Get picks like this daily. Today's launch numbers, the top launches, AI and tech news, and a daily opportunity pick, straight to your inbox.

Want to reach these readers? Sponsor an issue.

I pretty much always have a kernel project going on, and have been that way for decades. Over the past couple of years, that's been Anos, which has gotten further along than any of my previous hobby kernels, supporting IPC, multitasking, SMP (x86-64 only right now) and running on real hardware.LLMs (mostly Claude Code) have been used during development, but I learned early on that it's not _great_ at code at this level, so I've restricted its use to mostly documentation and tests. There's _a little_ AI code in the user space, but I have a strict "no AI code" rule in the kernel itself. I find this helps not only with the quality / functionality of the code, but also with learning - for example, even though I've written multiple kernels in the past, it wasn't until Anos that I _truly_ grokked pagetable management and what was possible with a good VMM interface, and if I'd outsourced that implementation to an LLM I probably wouldn't have learned any of that.In terms of approach, Anos avoids legacy platform features and outdated wiki / tutorial resources, and instead tries to implement as much as possible from manuals and datasheets, and it's definitely worked out well so far. There's no support for legacy platform features or peripherals, with all IO being memory mapped and MSI/MSI-X interrupts (no PIC), for example, which has helped keep the codebase focused and easy to work on. The kernel compiles to about 100KiB on x86-64, with enough features to be able to support multitasking and device drivers in user space.As a hobby project, progress ebbs and flows with pressures of my day job etc, and the main branch has been quiet for the last few months. I have however been working on a USB stack as time allows, and hopefully will soon have at least basic HID support to allow me to take the next step and make Anos interactive.I don't know how useful projects like Anos are any more, given we now live in the age of AI coding, but it's a fun learning experience and helps keep me technically grounded, and I'll carry on with it for as long as those things remain true.

HN · launched Apr 4, 2026 · 115 upvotes (top 10%) · 0 views

Niche: experimental and embedded operating systems · 142 launches, 6 in the last 7 days ▼ -60% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Dev tools
  • Developer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

No Hand-writing an OS microkernel with IPC, virtual memory, multitasking, and SMP on x86-64 and RISC-V requires bare-metal systems programming that LLMs cannot autonomously orchestrate without human kernel expertise.

What it would actually take: Writing a bootable microkernel involves C/Assembly, custom linker scripts, bootloader protocol implementations (Multiboot2/UEFI), page table management, interrupt service routines (APIC), context switching, and cache coherency protocols. The hard parts are low-level debugging without standard runtime tooling, hardware concurrency race conditions in SMP, and strict hardware-architecture specification adherence. It demands extensive real-world experience in OS architecture and hardware datasheets.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: seL4 kernel, QNX message passing IPC, Minix, Linux, Windows NT

Concerns raised: AI-generated code skepticism, Lack of Linux syscall compatibility limits practical usability, Slow porting of existing programs from Linux/BSD, Performance trade-off with hypervisor alternative, Fork dependency incompatibility

Feature requests: POSIX layer for easier software porting, Linux syscall translation layer for binary compatibility, Support for USB HID for interactivity, Non-ACPI platform device management

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 402 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #57 of 403 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 157 days after the earliest competitor.

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.