frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

Open in hackernews

Tilck: A Tiny Linux-Compatible Kernel

https://github.com/vvaltchev/tilck
159•chubot•7h ago

Comments

jlundberg•6h ago
The README was surprisingly lengthy and interesting. Worth a read for osdev people!
adastra22•6h ago
This is fantastic. The problem with Linux is the dev culture at the top. I've long wished for an alternative kernel project that might serve as a better dev model. This has the potential.
marsven_422•6h ago
The kernel dev culture is excellent, it's pure meritocracy.

We all know that Rust in the kernel is a political operation to change this to woke.

adrianN•1h ago
I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean. Is it a joke that I'm not getting?
yjftsjthsd-h•5h ago
> I've long wished for an alternative kernel project that might serve as a better dev model.

Do you have something against FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, illumos, Redox, or (if you don't need a unix-like) Haiku?

adastra22•5h ago
Linux syscall compatibility.
Cloudef•5h ago
Doesn't BSD have that?
yjftsjthsd-h•5h ago
FreeBSD, NetBSD, and illumos have that.
weinzierl•6h ago
Every couple of months a new "Operating System" kernel which does not provide hardware abstraction and only runs in a VM pops up.

Tilck is not like that!

Tilck is a real operating system. It runs on real hardware.

The space for the former is overly crowded but I think Tilck really fills a gap that has been mostly unoccupied before.

userbinator•6h ago
Doesn't look like you can run WINE on it, which would make for an interesting Windows replacement.
lukaslalinsky•6h ago
Why would you just not use Linux to run WINE. It's not realistic to replace all the drivers that make Linux so universally usable as it is. If you specifically want it as a Windows replacement, the Linux distro that Valve is building seems like the best bet.
hnlmorg•5h ago
The readme explicitly states it’s not suitable for desktop usage. For staters, it doesn’t support all the features needed to run x11.

This looks like a very interesting project for OS devs but if you’re after a Windows replacement then there’s already a few options out there from ReactOS to Linux-distros that come with Wine configured as part of the base install.

ryao•4h ago
Details on what is missing that a X11 server needs are here:

https://github.com/vvaltchev/tilck/discussions/81

Sammi•2h ago
Once you're running something as heavy as a desktop application or game, then the full Linux kernel is not the heavy part anymore.
brucehoult•5h ago
Nice! Looks like an interesting mid-point between xv6 (modern reimplementation of Sixth Edition Unix from 1975 e.g. Lion book) and a full Linux kernel.

Great to see it runs on the LicheeRV Nano, a $9 RISC-V board with 1.0 GHz 64 bit CPU (C906) with MMU, FPU, 128 bit vector unit (RVV draft 0.7.1) and 256 MB of in-package DDR3. That's comparable to a midlife Pentium III or PowerPC G4.

It should be a very easy port to the Milk-V Duo 256M (same SG2002 SoC) or Duo S (SG2000 with 512 MB RAM for $9.90) or original Duo (closely related CV1800B with 64 MB RAM for $5).

No network or block device support at present, and no multi-core either, by the looks.

anthk•4h ago
A G4 with Altivec was almost on par on a PIV with SSE2 for multimedia.
brucehoult•4h ago
Multimedia is important for some uses, not for others.

And what speed G4, against what speed Pentium 4?

G4 started from 450 MHz and went to 1.6 GHz, with several different µarch along the way.

Conversely, the Pentium 4 ranged from 1.3 GHz to 3.8 GHz.

G4 and P3 at least covered a nearly identical MHz range, and with similar MHz in the market at the same times.

bayindirh•1h ago
Pentium 4 had an exceptionally long pipeline to be able to hit higher frequencies, trading-off high IPC numbers in the process, most of the time. On top of that, Pentium 4 also “looped” the same instruction while waiting data resulting in lower efficiency and higher heat output.

So, I assume, they are “step by step” comparable. i.e. slowest P4 equal to slowest G3 and they are again equal at next stepping and so on.

hypercube33•28m ago
The a version of the Pentium 4 was slower than the Pentium IIi per clock (launch model) and used goofy rambus memory
weinzierl•1h ago
"No network or block device support at present, and no multi-core either, by the looks."

The first versions of Linux I used did not have multi-core support and I can imagine a Linux without networking, but no block devices?

Does that mean just character devices? How does the FAT driver work then?

brucehoult•1h ago
It supports a read-only boot drive, but other than that just tempfs -- just like running a LiveCD version of Ubuntu etc.

Implementing those things is on the TODO list.

bitwize•1h ago
The earliest versions of Linux were pretty much just a terminal emulator for the PC console. Gotta start somewhere!

It looks like TILCK uses RAM images to provide FAT support, which is mainly used for initrd.

ryao•5h ago
It is interesting, although the lack of multiuser support is unfortunate. I really hope that the author reconsiders his stance on multiuser support, even if it is merely to allow things like chmod/chgrp to set file ownership to other users and groups. That would open the door to hosting a NFS server.
hnlmorg•5h ago
Its file system compatibility story is a bigger hurdle there.

To be honest, you’re much better off with a battle hardened platform for your use case. Tilck is meant to be educational, not secure in either the InfoSec nor data robustness sense.

ryao•5h ago
Upon seeing this, thoughts keep occurring to me such as:

  * “It could be fun to be the author of a block layer, VFS and an AHCI driver for SATA. NCQ support is a must if I do.”
  * “It could be fun to port ZFS: ztest and zdb, plus the userland version of the driver into which they hook need pthreads, but the important userland utilities do not. Having to statically link everything would be a pain. I would probably have to reimplement the entire SPL for this to work and that would probably be at least 10,000 lines of code.”
  * “If I port ZFS, a NFS server needs to follow so ZFS has an application. This will need support for setting/getting user/group ownership and mode bits. If I rewrite the VFS, I could maybe sneak that feature into it for a NFS server to use while preserving the documented syscall behavior that requires everything be root. If I port the NFS server from illumos, it could share the SPL code with ZFS. NFSv4 permissions will be needed to make it fully happy. Beyond that, I will need a network stack.”
  * “It could be fun to port a network stack. Maybe LwIP could be used.”
  * “It could be fun to write an e1000 driver.”
I have already found the documentation I need if I actually were to implement AHCI and e1000 drivers:

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc/manual/pci-pci-x-famil...

If I were to do all of this, I would likely try my best to make it a production platform. The purpose would be fun.

Anyway, I wonder if these thoughts will continue if I sleep on them.

yjftsjthsd-h•5h ago
Could probably just record user:group in the filesystem and ignore it at runtime except when serving clients? Ex. a Linux file server running as root can still check permissions and ownership without having to change its own user. (Although as an interesting thought experiment, forking per session and switching to the client user would give you file permissions for "free" by way of the kernel imposing them on you...)
ryao•5h ago
As long as the VFS permits those calls to go to the filesystem driver, that is doable. A casual inspction of the documentation suggests that doing this will return an error from the syscall. I am not sure what a kernel driver calling the VFS can do in terms of getting/setting these yet.
marto1•5h ago
I can see it's marked "educational", but would it be also suitable for smallish embedded devices ? Assuming the bootloader part is swapped out, etc.
rurban•2h ago
Previous discussions:

3 years ago, 75 comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34295165 (no riscv64 then)

5 years ago, 7 comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28040210

CaseFlatline•2h ago
Very nice. Its great to see how fast it boots, and it can run doom (framebuffer): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ce1pMlZO_mI (also nice to see the dev takes the time to reply to an aspiring CS student on what it takes to grow in this field - comments in youtube)
bartvk•1h ago
Nice and short video. Demonstrates Vim, which seems like a sizable piece of software to get compiled with a subset of all Linux syscalls.
sylware•59m ago
A kernel is mostly "hardware drivers" with an ABI.

That's why performant "standard" hardware programing interfaces are so much important. Those interfaces should be the simple and stable in time as much as possible.

Many hardware realms have such _performant_ interface: nvme, usb, etc.

Basically it means DMA, doorbells/IRQ "ring buffers", command ring buffers("queues").

Because for those alternative kernel initiatives, this would allow them to become 'real-life' much faster.

And a NOTE related to RISC-V hardware: keep an eye on arm piggybacking RISC-V chips(they are the bad guys with their blocking/$$$ intellectual property), but the target goal does include AV1 video dec/enc blocks instead of mpeg, and DisplayPort instead of hdmi, because those are hardly less worse than arm.

And some hardware is going even further, the "next step": user level hardware queues (look at AMD GPUs which started to implement those). I know there is 3D pipeline programming behind this hardware interface, but I believ that if they started to clean the base hardware interface, they will cleanup their 3D pipeline programming too.

Show HN: Infinite Canvas for Notes

https://infinote.surge.sh/
1•stagas•3m ago•0 comments

Solving a Chaucerian mystery, and revealing a medieval preacher's meme

https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/song-of-wade-lost-english-legend-decoded
1•geox•4m ago•0 comments

Let Me Cook You a Vulnerability: Exploiting the Thermomix TM5

https://www.synacktiv.com/en/publications/let-me-cook-you-a-vulnerability-exploiting-the-thermomix-tm5
2•todsacerdoti•5m ago•0 comments

Show HN: DataRamen, a Fast SQL Explorer with Automatic Joins and Data Navigation

https://dataramen.xyz/
1•oleksandr_dem•6m ago•0 comments

Spain awards Huawei contracts to manage intelligence agency wiretaps

https://therecord.media/spain-awards-contracts-huawei-intelligence-agency-wiretaps
1•consumer451•6m ago•0 comments

A former OpenAI engineer describes what it's like to work there

https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/15/a-former-openai-engineer-describes-what-its-really-like-to-work-there/
1•tzury•6m ago•0 comments

Sibling study finds early education boosts brain power

https://phys.org/news/2025-07-sibling-early-boosts-brain-power.html
1•PaulHoule•8m ago•0 comments

Sending Web Push Notifications from Rails

https://joyofrails.com/articles/web-push-notifications-from-rails
1•thunderbong•8m ago•0 comments

Show HN: HN v0.2.1 – Native macOS app for reading HN

https://120.dev/120-hn
2•120-dev•11m ago•0 comments

A Geek's Guide to Photography

https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/photo_basics/
1•ibobev•13m ago•0 comments

Some States Are Pushing Back on Library E-Book Licensing Fees

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/books/libraries-e-books-licensing.html
1•donohoe•14m ago•0 comments

UK tech minister negotiated nothing with Google. He may get even less than that

https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/16/uk_gov_google_comment/
1•rntn•14m ago•0 comments

Isometric Tutorials

https://clintbellanger.net/articles/
1•ibobev•15m ago•0 comments

Procedural Content Generation in Games

https://www.pcgbook.com/
1•ibobev•15m ago•0 comments

Intigriti teams with Nvidia to launch bug bounty and VDP

https://www.intigriti.com/blog/business-insights/intigriti-teams-with-nvidia-to-launch-bug-bounty-vulnerability-disclosure-program
1•inti_bug•16m ago•1 comments

METR's AI productivity study is good

https://www.seangoedecke.com/impact-of-ai-study/
1•rbanffy•24m ago•0 comments

Jeremy Bicha – A Child Sexual Predator Built Your Desktop

https://fandompulse.substack.com/p/jeremy-bicha-a-child-sexual-predator
2•IlikeKitties•25m ago•1 comments

America's Anti-Immigrant Fever Is Starting to Break

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-07-16/gallup-poll-on-immigration-shows-anti-immigrant-fever-is-breaking
2•petethomas•28m ago•0 comments

Fibonacci(50) as a Fractal Sequence Diagram

https://app.ilograph.com/demo.ilograph.Fibonacci%2520Sequence/Fib(50)
1•billyp-rva•28m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I Recently Built a Project

3•FerkiHN•31m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Android SDK easter egg showcase

https://github.com/TrianguloY/isUserAMonkey
1•TrianguloY•33m ago•0 comments

If [ ] the user wants the latest docs, do not use 2024 in the search query

https://gist.github.com/sergeyk/b1eb7bf8fd8db2566c082409dbd3eca9
1•tosh•38m ago•0 comments

Streamline Global Client Communication with 20 Secure Accounts

1•yt1314•39m ago•0 comments

Nvidia Chip in Russian Drone with Autonomous Targeting and Engagement

https://balticsentinel.eu/8284227/ukraine-uncovers-nvidia-chip-in-russian-drone-turning-it-into-a-digital-predator-capable-of-autonomous-targeting-and-engagement
3•INGELRII•39m ago•0 comments

Can you build a company without sacrificing a healthy lifestyle?

https://join.40hourentrepreneur.com/
1•fabianoao•43m ago•0 comments

AI Turned My Simple Blog into 81 Files and 83 Dependencies

https://diqi.dev/ai-code-generation/
3•diqi•43m ago•0 comments

Hey potential cofounder, I won't sign your NDA

https://developerwithacat.com/blog/202507/cofounder-wont-sign-nda/
1•mmarian•45m ago•0 comments

Nintendo Famicom and the secret of Nintendo's success

https://dfarq.homeip.net/nintendo-famicom-and-the-secret-of-nintendos-success/
1•rbanffy•47m ago•0 comments

The Horny Universe Series Day 4 – Penetration Validation

https://github.com/JGPTech/The_Horny_Universe_Series/tree/main/Part_004_Penetration_Validation
1•JonPoplett•49m ago•1 comments

EKS enables ultra scale AI/ML workloads with support for 100K nodes per cluster

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/amazon-eks-enables-ultra-scale-ai-ml-workloads-with-support-for-100k-nodes-per-cluster/
2•csantanapr•49m ago•1 comments