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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

It's not for industry, but I keep mentioning it because it's so surprising and little known: The Nintendo Switch uses a home-grown microkernel. It's not UNIX-compatible, fits into ~30K lines of code IIRC, and everything from the USB to the Graphics drivers are sandboxed in userspace. (Too bad NVIDIA's Secure Boot code didn't match Nintendo's standards.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch_system_softwar...

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How do you know the LoC number? Have you worked on it?

It was so small that a solo developer reimplemented the entire kernel.

https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/hygtnx/mesospher...

https://github.com/Atmosphere-NX/Atmosphere/tree/mesosphere-...

> Nintendo is exempt from GPLv2 licensing and may (at its option) instead license any source code authored for the libmesosphere project under the Zero-Clause BSD license.

Er, what? Why would a 3rd-party reimplementation allow Nintendo to use their work?

Probably because it's based entirely on (non-black-box) reverse-engineered Switch binaries, and is therefore very possibly a derivative work of Nintendo's copyrighted code.

To not get sued six ways from Sunday? If a company could sue me out of existence, I may be nicer than I have to be to them.

Literally nothing I have ever read about Nintendo makes me think this would even give them a moment of pause as they sue the author into oblivion. (This is a comment on Nintendo's behavior, not the legality of the author's actions.)

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