Moxnox 1.0: A Hobby OS That Fuses Windows NT's Kernel With Linux's Btrfs
Moxnox 1.0: NT-Like, POSIX-Compatible OS Running Atop Btrfs
Moxnox is a 130,000-line C++ hobby operating system that mimics Windows NT's syscalls and low-level interfaces while running a full GNU userland on btrfs. It self-hosts on amd64 and aarch64, implements 642 of roughly 1,200 POSIX 2024 functions, and deliberately skips Win32 DLLs. The author built it for fun and to explore why NT's kernel design—eventfd, pidfd—was ahead of its time.
Also, the NT kernel is criminally underrated, and pretty much unknown to hobbyists. It had features that Linux took years and years to come up with its own design for, such as eventfd and pidfd.
- EvanAnderson
> Also, the NT kernel is criminally underrated, and pretty much unknown to hobbyists. It had features that Linux took years and years to come up with its own design for...
A person after my own heart. NT was actually designed, versus being a reimplementation of an existing thing.
- pjmlp
Kudos for not being another UNIX clone.
However Windows NT originally was already POSIXy, what it lacked all these years was Microsoft being serious about POSIX subsystem, had that been the case, probably Linux would never taken off among PC, the same experience as OS X would be there in 1993.
- chasil
Hard file locking makes Windows Update into agony.
I can see the 70s motivation for it, but it is a terrible burden in modern times.
Hopefully is is not implemented here.
- dvfjsdhgfv
I was looking for that line:
> The contract is that the syscalls and low-level interfaces match those of NT, but not the daemons or how the kernel itself is structured. This is in contrast to what ReactOS aims to do, which is an exact recreation of Windows.
- phendrenad2
> None of the substantive code was written by AI.
That is impressive