A modern Rust rewrite of the Linux 0.11 kernel — boots on i386 in QEMU, runs a self-hosted Unix-style userland.

$ cd kernel && make run … Welcome to linux-0.11-rs. https://github.com/Poseidon-fan/linux-0.11-rs (login: 0 @ linux-rs :: Wed May 27 09:35:43 UTC 2026) [root@linux-rs /root]# ls /bin | wc -l 69

linux-0.11-rs rebuilds the 1991 Linux 0.11 kernel from scratch in modern Rust. It keeps the original system's semantics — what it does — while rethinking how it's expressed: stronger types, clearer module boundaries, idiomatic abstractions everywhere. The kernel boots on emulated i386 hardware, runs a full init → shell → coreutils stack, and ships with the tooling to build your own bootable image in one command.

✨ Highlights

• A kernel with most of what Linux 0.11 had — processes, virtual memory with demand paging and CoW fork, the Minix v1 filesystem, ATA disk driver, VGA + PS/2 console, 8250 serial console, TTY layer, signals, and the complete syscall table.
• A Rust user-space "std" — user_lib mirrors the public shape of std::{fs, io, path, env, process, time} so user programs read like ordinary Rust, not like syscall plumbing.
• A real userland — 80+ coreutils plus a hand-written POSIX-subset shell (sh) with pipelines, control flow, functions, glob, command and arithmetic substitution, and an interactive line editor with Tab completion and history.
• One-command images — tools/build-disk.sh compiles every user program, lays them out into a Unix-style filesystem, and packs the result into a bootable disk image.
• Companion image tools — mbrkit and miniximg are standalone crates, useful on their own for any project that touches MBR or Minix v1 images.
• Devcontainer included — clone, open in VS Code, hit "Reopen in Container", run make run.

🚀 Quick start

Build every user program, lay out /etc /dev /bin, pack into disk.img.

tools/build-disk.sh

Build the kernel and boot it in QEMU.

cd kernel && make run # VGA console cd kernel && make run-console # serial console (-nographic)

You'll land at a shell prompt in /root. Try:

ls /bin # browse what's installed echo $((1 + 2 * 3)) # arithmetic expansion for f in /etc/*; do echo $f; done # for loop + glob fact() { if [ $1 -le 1 ]; then echo 1; else echo $(($1 * $(fact $(($1-1))))); fi; } fact 7 # → 5040 ec<TAB> # completes to `echo ` ↑ # walks command history

Outside a devcontainer you'll also need a recent Rust nightly (pinned in rust-toolchain.toml), qemu-system-i386, the x86_64-linux-gnu-* cross-binutils, and the local image/test tools:

tools/install-tools.sh # installs mbrkit, miniximg, ktest onto PATH

✅ Tests

End-to-end tests boot the kernel under QEMU and drive the serial console from short .ktest scripts under ktest/suites/.

tools/run-tests.sh # run everything tools/run-tests.sh --suite=shell # one suite tools/run-tests.sh --test-set=shell.basic # one test tools/run-tests.sh --disable-reboot # share one QEMU across tests

🗂️ Repository layout

kernel/              The kernel itself
user_lib/            std-style user-space library
user_lib_macros/     proc-macro: #[user_lib::main]
user_program/        ~80 coreutils + the `sh` shell
ktest/               end-to-end test runner driving QEMU over serial
mbrkit/              MBR disk-image CLI (also on crates.io)
miniximg/            Minix-fs image CLI and library
rootfs/              disk-image content template (/etc, /root, …)
tools/               developer scripts (build-disk.sh, run-tests.sh, …)
tutorial/            mdbook walkthrough (work in progress)
.devcontainer/       ready-to-use dev environment

🛣️ Project status

• Kernel — substantially feature-complete relative to Linux 0.11. Floppy support is intentionally out of scope; ongoing work is on polish and tooling.
• User library — covers what the shell and coreutils need today.
• Userland — usable for real interactive work.
• Tutorial — early draft; the long-term plan is a complete build-from-scratch walkthrough.

📚 Tutorial

cargo install mdbook cd tutorial && mdbook serve --open

🙏 Acknowledgements

• Thanks to yuan-xy/Linux-0.11 for providing the original Linux 0.11 kernel source used as an important reference during development.
• Many parts of this project were also inspired by or implemented with reference to rcore-os/rCore-Tutorial-v3.

📄 License

See LICENSE.