Greg Kurtzer's Ginux boots a Linux userspace on a kernel that isn't Linux
Greg Kurtzer's Ginux is now a userspace kernel
Ginux is an experimental Rust-first x86-64 operating system that boots directly through UEFI with its own memory management, scheduler, VFS, networking, and Linux ABI. Unmodified Alpine and Rocky Linux userspaces run inside kernel-native domains, and Rocky Linux 10 systemd reaches multi-user.target. Of 375 Linux 6.12 syscalls, 82 are complete, 245 partial, and 48 policy-denied. The author calls it a research toy, not a Linux replacement.
The name is a joke in the same family as Linux: Ginux combines Linux, GPT, and Greg. To keep the author's ego within its configured resource limit, the G officially stands for GPT.
- qalmakka
The question I always have when I see these userspace kernels is, Linux in Userspace exists. You can boot Linux with a root in userspace already. Why write a new kernel from scratch instead of fixing/improving usermode Linux instead, which has the benefit of providing the entire Linux API already?
- acd
How is Ginux different from User mode Linux?
- asdfsa32
This is kind of the wrong approach when linux namespaces exist and rootless namespaces are approach full spectrum.
- ajasmin
So how exactly can you control multiple isolated address spaces for the leaf user processes and how do you handle syscalls? Does the host kernel have facilities for normal user processes to do so?
- TnS-hun
Post from yesterday: