[HN Gopher] Show HN: Anos - a hand-written ~100KiB microkernel f...
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       Show HN: Anos - a hand-written ~100KiB microkernel for x86-64 and
       RISC-V
        
       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       approach, Anos avoids legacy platform features and outdated wiki /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.
        
       Author : noone_youknow
       Score  : 7 points
       Date   : 2026-04-04 06:58 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
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       (page generated 2026-04-06 23:00 UTC)