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Your kernel will likely have well defined interfaces. You don't need libraries to talk to the kernel.

But how can you use those interfaces without an ABI?

Fundamentally, an ABI is the way you define interfaces.

Except for Linux, those well-defined interfaces sit behind a C API.

Not really - Linux syscalls are stable, so you are free to run your binary with a statically compiled libc and never touch the installed one. You can also handcraft your syscalls in assembly.

This will not work on Windows, where the kernel API is a DLL and syscall numbes are routinely changed.

That's what I said - on Linux the syscall API is stable while on all other OSes you have to go through libc to talk to the kernel.

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