Top 6 C hobby-kernel Projects
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AppSignal
AppSignal knows why the f*#k it crashed. Stop vibe-debugging. Every exception, every backtrace, grouped so you see patterns, not noise.
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Aero1EOS
Aero1EOS is a OS made by a 12-13 year old male named "Ali Yahya Ali Sumaily", Or "علي يحي علي صميلي" In Arabic, The OS is designed to be minimal as possible, the OS has many cool features and many cool commands that has cool purposes (also im cool right), and it uses MIT, and its pretty secure, ok ily please star it pretty please
Project mention: I Coded a Solo 64-Bit Operating System on an Android TV (986 Commits as of 17 Jan, 2026) | dev.to | 2026-06-16⭐ GitHub Repository: Here
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Project mention: Show HN: BananaOS, vibecoded operating system that boots on a 486 with ~11MB RAM | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-02-27
My 10-year-old son has been deep in low-level rabbit holes lately and ended up vibe-coding his own operating system. Since he’s still a kid and not on HN himself, I’m posting this on his behalf with his permission.
This started as curiosity about how computers actually boot, and somehow escalated into writing a kernel, building a GUI, and setting up CI that produces a bootable OS image on every commit.
BananaOS is a small experimental operating system built mainly for learning and exploration of low-level systems programming. It currently targets i386 BIOS systems and is designed to run on extremely constrained hardware. Fun fact: Wallpaper logic, one of the most important OS functionalities, is directly implemented in the kernel. That cracked my son up!
Some highlights:
Multiboot-compliant kernel loaded via GRUB
VESA framebuffer graphics with double buffering
Custom window manager with movable and resizable windows
Dock-style application launcher
PS/2 keyboard and mouse input handling
PCI enumeration and AHCI SATA support
Basic applications (terminal, notepad, calculator, file explorer, settings)
Memory detection and allocation based on available RAM
Boots in QEMU with about 11.2 MB RAM
Includes an ISR workaround to emulate CMOV so it can boot on Intel 486 CPUs
One thing I found particularly fun: he also added GitHub Actions workflows that automatically build the OS image for every commit, so the repo continuously produces fresh bootable artifacts.
The project is very much experimental and should only be run inside an Virtual Machine.
Repo (with build instructions and screenshots):
https://github.com/Banaxi-Tech/BananaOS
Quick start (only on Linux, check dependencies, and see README):
git clone https://github.com/Banaxi-Tech/BananaOS
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FEB-Kernel
This is a bare-bones kernel. I'm Open - Sourcing this so it can get some real development in
- Mascot Included: Prints a text-mode ASCII Otter mascot directly to screen address 0xb8000 on boot.
The repository is built to compile with zero host dependencies inside cloud environments like GitHub Codespaces. End users just need to clone the code, compile with a single GCC command, and pull Limine manually to test it in QEMU.
I am acting as the project lead and looking for contributors to help build out the PS/2 keyboard scancode matrix and a basic command shell next. I would love to hear your feedback on the architecture!
GitHub Repo: [https://github.com/NEWMAN50ott/FEB-Kernel]
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Index
What are some of the best open-source hobby-kernel projects in C? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | opuntiaOS | 660 |
| 2 | ghost | 648 |
| 3 | Aero1EOS | 11 |
| 4 | BananaOS | 10 |
| 5 | os | 2 |
| 6 | FEB-Kernel | 1 |
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