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Ixiaus

Not GNU projects but relevant and different kernels / operating systems:

http://www.barrelfish.org/

https://github.com/xomboverlord/xomb

http://www.returninfinity.com/baremetal.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeL4

I don't consider any of these to be a waste of time in the least; some move quicker than others but ultimately every one of these projects is advancing the state of the art and we may one day see the fruit of this difficult type of work (building kernels from scratch).

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Don't forget templeos...as trippy as it is.

Absolutely, TempleOS is an amazing piece of work including its programming language (Holy C).

Completely agreed. I wonder if it will ever 'leave' his hands, as it really is a nice language, a well thought out C improvement (for the uninitiated - http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Doc/HolyC.html ). I'm very versed with who the creator is, and his personality, but honestly think he may be one of the smartest people in the field. It's a shame more people don't take him seriously(and to their point, I don't always blame them).

People tend to not take crazy people seriously. That's kinda sad because the guy is indeed one of the smartest people in the field.

I just hope he gets some help and is able to work his issues out.

I forgot about HaikuOS too - I love what those guys are doing. Can't remember if they wrote the kernel from scratch too?

Sort of. It's based on the NewOS kernel written by Travis Geiselbrecht ( http://newos.org ) who in turned based many of the concepts on his experience as a BeOS kernel engineer. The Haiku project chose the NewOS kernel because it was open and used reasonably similar concepts and goals as the BeOS kernel did, which they'd otherwise need to emulate.

Huh, I always assumed that HURD was just GNU politics, what with the all the GNU tools with linux, while the GNU's original goal was an OS complete with kernel. When I look at it in this light, HURD makes more sense. I do disagree with saying that every OS advances the state of the art though, a lot of them will probably end up as *nix clones. I have respect for anyone who builds a kernel from scratch, but I also think that most of them ad totally batshit insane (Linus included.). They do great work, but I didn't understand why.

Why wouldn't they be advancing it? It might not be academically rigorous in some cases (in some cases it is) but every single project is doing something unique and pushing the sphere of known solutions to problems further out. Very few of the projects even want to be nix clones and are exploring areas that aren't explored by the nixes because they are too big and static now experiment (for good reason! it isn't a fault).

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