Darnix
Darwin Built with Nix
Details
- External ID
- 48238256
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Darnix
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- May 22, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 13
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.654281098546042
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
The Darwin kernel (XNU) has been open source since 1999. But "open source" and "you can actually build and boot it" are very different things. XNU depends on proprietary tooling, kexts, and a bunch of open source projects published without a build system.Darnix builds the whole thing with Nix. The kernel, the filesystem, the boot image, all the way to a running QEMU instance. We patched XNU to run on QEMU without kexts, ported HFS+ from a kernel extension into the kernel itself, fixed GRUB's Mach-O loader, and wired it all together as a flake. The build is fully sandboxed. No root, no volume mounting, no device access, no network.The bigger idea is a revival of PureDarwin (https://www.puredarwin.org/), a standalone OS on Apple's open source Darwin layer, with Nix managing everything above the kernel. Sort of like a Nix OS on XNU instead of Linux.Right now the kernel boots, mounts a ramdisk, and runs a single static binary. Next step is a shell.https://github.com/jonhermansen/darnixTechnical details and the full list of patches are in the README. I would love to hear from anyone who’s thought about this space!---Darnix is not affiliated with or endorsed by Apple Inc. This is not macOS. Apple, macOS, and related trademarks are the property of Apple Inc. Darwin is licensed under the APSL.
Enrichment
- Theme
- macOS utilities and system tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- nix-based darwin tooling
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Rebuilding and packaging Apple's proprietary-dependent Darwin kernel (XNU) and its kexts entirely using Nix requires deep systems programming, kernel internals knowledge, and specialized toolchain hacking.
What it would actually take: Requires deep familiarity with the XNU kernel source code, Mach-O binary formats, low-level Apple toolchains (cctools, ld64), and Nix derivation engineering. You must reverse-engineer or replace missing Apple-internal build tools and proprietary drivers, patching C/C++ kernel headers and orchestrating hermetic builds for complex multi-architecture kernel extensions.
Discussion
1 comment analyzed.
Concerns raised: Apple license restrictions
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 49 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #22 of 50 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 192 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Nucleus · hn · 2026-06-09 · 40 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- NixOS-DGX-Spark · hn · 2026-08-02 · 132 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Linux installer .exe without pendrives (secure-boot compatible) · hn · 2026-04-21 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- laminix · github · 2026-09-24 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Grsh · hn · 2026-01-14 · 50 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- macOS Apps on Linux: SwiftUI for Linux (and AppKit, NSFoundation, etc.) · hn · 2026-06-08 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.36
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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