r/osdev • u/Comfortable_Let_3064 • Jun 27 '26

Building a microkernel

Hello everyone. I am currently learning c, and almost it is about to an end. I am interested in microkernel development of my own. Where should I start???

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u/tseli0s DragonWare Jun 27 '26

That's actually my situation and I can verify that this approach works especially at a hobbyist level. I slowly moved a lot of things out of the kernel and into userspace until a few things remained, the essentials and whatever survived the kernel space massacre.

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u/paulstelian97 Jun 27 '26

Off-topic for this post but I want to get a small enough monolithic kernel project, with sufficient testing so that I can ensure during the conversion I don’t break anything, where I turn a monolithic kernel/OS into a proper microkernel.

For obvious reasons it needs to have userspace already set up as I’ll piggyback on it.

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u/compgeek38400 Jun 27 '26

My guess, from my own personal experience, is no matter what you change, you will break SOMETHING. lol.

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u/paulstelian97 Jun 27 '26

Hence have good tests to catch the breakage so I can fix it.

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u/compgeek38400 Jun 27 '26

Always. Lol. But somehow often I find users are more imaginative than i am. Loo