Tilck: a tiny Linux-compatible kernel

Tilckis an educationalmonolithickernel designed to be Linux-compatible at binary level. It runs on i686 and RISCV64 at the moment. Project's small-scale and simple design makes it theperfect playgroundfor playing in kernel mode while retaining the ability to compare how thevery sameusermode bitsrun on the Linux kernel as well. That's arare featurein the realm of educational kernels. Because of that, building a program for Tilck requires just agcc-musltoolchain frombootlin.com. Tilck hasno needto have its own set of custom written applications, like most educational kernels do. It just runs mainstream Linux programs like theBusyBoxsuite. While the Linux-compatibility and the monolithic design might seem a limitation from the OS research point of view, on the other side, such design bring the whole project much closer toreal-worldapplications in the future, compared to the case where some serious (or huge) effort is required to port pre-existing software on it. Also, nothing stops Tilck from implementing custom non-Linux syscalls that aware apps might take advantage of.

Tilck GitHub page

Tilck implements about 100 Linux syscalls, and is not focused on replacing the Linux kernel or even becoming a generic desktop or server operating system. It supports both i686 and RISC-V, has support for FAT, and a whole slew of other features. It can run a number of console and even a few framebuffer applications, but don't expect things like X11 to work, or to ever work.