Thought Leadership
Gregory Kurtzer has developed his own Rust-based kernel with the help of an AI agent in just eleven days. It can run unmodified Linux applications.
Gregory Kurtzer, founder of the Linux distributions CentOS and Rocky Linux and co-founder of CIQ, has unveiled Ginux, an operating system kernel of his own. He did not write most of the code himself. Instead, an AI agent handled the bulk of the development. According to the project’s repository, a single, continuously running task in OpenAI Codex, powered by the GPT-5.6 Sol model, worked on the kernel for eleven days. The effort produced around 139,000 lines of implementation and test code across 1,097 Git commits. Kurtzer estimates the API costs at approximately USD 8,000.
Linux as a “Personality”
Ginux is not a fork of the Linux kernel. It is an independent kernel for the x86-64 architecture, written primarily in Rust. Its memory management, scheduler, process model, filesystems, network stack, and device drivers were all developed from scratch. At the same time, Ginux implements the Linux Application Binary Interface (ABI), which allows compiled programs to communicate with the kernel. This means existing Linux applications can run without modification. According to the repository, Ginux supports 375 system calls from the Linux 6.12 interface, although some are fully implemented while others have limited support.
The project describes Linux as a “personality” that Ginux presents to the outside world, rather than the kernel running underneath. According to Kurtzer, the name Ginux combines Linux, GPT, and Greg. The kernel is distributed as a single file called GINUX.EFI and boots directly via UEFI. In a QEMU virtual machine, it can boot Rocky Linux 10 up to systemd’s multi-user.target state.
Humans Define the Architecture
Kurtzer calls his approach Human-Directed Agentic Engineering. Humans define the architecture, requirements, constraints, milestones, and acceptance criteria. The AI agent handles implementation, testing, debugging, and revisions. With this project, Kurtzer wanted to find out whether complex software systems could be developed this way in a short period of time. His experience with operating systems was crucial to defining the requirements and evaluating the agent’s work.
No Support for Physical Hardware Yet
“Ginux is a research prototype, not a production kernel and not a replacement for Linux,” the project repository states. So far, the kernel runs only in QEMU. There is no hardware profile for physical systems, and it does not yet support GPUs or NVMe storage devices. It has also not undergone an independent security audit. Kurtzer plans to repeat the initial performance measurements on a Linux host using KVM and expand the tests to cover networking, storage, and inter-process communication. He has published a technical report on the Zenodo platform.
(Editorial Team)
