A hobby operating system started in 2006, revived in 2026.
KenaxOS began as a 32-bit i386 kernel written by Kenneth Hough as a middle/high school project — a way to learn how operating systems work, working from the Intel manuals, OS-design books, and the OSDev forums of the day. It was hosted on SourceForge, then migrated to GitHub, and is now being rebuilt from the ground up.
v1 is a Rust microkernel targeting modern hardware (aarch64-first, x86_64 later). It's designed around capability-based security with kernel-tracked data provenance — a foundation that supports embedded use, regulated informatics workloads, and general-purpose hobby OS exploration without committing to any one vertical early.
v0.x is the original C kernel, preserved unchanged in
legacy-0.x/ and tagged v0.3.1.
Active early development. Nothing here is production-ready and may never be. This is a deliberate hobby project — not a competitor to Linux, Windows, or macOS — aimed at being a small, well-designed, secure-by-construction kernel that's interesting to build on.
- Language: Rust (
no_stdkernel, user-mode services). - Architecture: microkernel — kernel handles memory, scheduling, IPC, capabilities, interrupt dispatch. Drivers, filesystems, networking all run in user space.
- Security model: seL4-inspired capabilities (CSpaces, Untyped memory, Retype, CDT for revocation) with one KenaxOS-unique addition: every capability carries a provenance token, enabling kernel-enforced data lineage.
- Reference platforms: QEMU
virtboard for dev, Raspberry Pi 5 for hardware bring-up. x86_64 as a future port. - Bootloader: Limine.
See docs/ for the design docs and roadmap.
Dual-licensed under either:
at your option. The legacy v0.x kernel in legacy-0.x/ remains under
its original GPL v2 license.
See CONTRIBUTING.md. All commits require a DCO
sign-off (git commit -s).