Gregory Kurtzer, founder of the CentOS and Rocky Linux distributions, introduced the project Ginux, developing the operating system kernel in the Rust language, aimed at achieving compatibility with the Linux kernel. The published research prototype is already capable of loading the system environment of the Alpine distributions with BusyBox and Rocky Linux 10 with systemd in multi-user console mode. The project code is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. Work on systems with x86-64 architecture is supported.
The prototype was created in 11 days as part of an experiment on application of the HDAE (Human-Directed Agentic Engineering) development technique to create complex projects at the Linux kernel level. When using the HDAE method, the code is generated by an AI agent (Codex with the GPT-5.6 Sol model is used), and the person is focused on developing the architecture, making decisions, coordinating work, forming a development plan and determining the readiness criteria for the components being developed. AI agents are also used for testing, reviewing and diagnosing problems.
The project does not try to copy technologies from the Linux kernel, but creates its own compatible implementations with an eye on them. Ginux provides an independent memory management system, task scheduler, boot process, process model, file systems, networking stack, device drivers, and a Linux ABI compatibility layer. The Ginux kernel loads directly via UEFI without the involvement of a Linux host system.
Ginux does not yet claim to replace Linux and is not ready for use in production systems, but is already suitable for experimentation and testing. In the long term, the project is considered as an operating system for running components for AI infrastructure in isolated containers. The name Ginux is formed as a combination of the words GPT/Gregory and Linux. The basis of the testing platform is the virtual machine Q35 (Intel Q35/ICH) launched using the KVM hypervisor with OVMF (Open Virtual Machine Firmware), Intel IOMMU and virtio devices.
Of 375 system calls of the Linux 6.12 kernel fully implemented 82, partially implemented – 245 and blocked for security reasons – 48. To identify failures that cannot be detected in synthetic tests, the performance of the kernel is evaluated by running real applications and libraries such as musl, glibc, BusyBox and systemd.
Among the plans:
- Ensuring that user space components of Linux distributions can run without using the Linux kernel.
- The ability to create isolated domains with their own sets of processes, address space, file systems, devices, resources and independent life cycle.
- Preparing a self-contained boot image.