kernidea

Kernidea is a collaborative framework and project focused on exploring kernel concepts and ideas for operating systems and runtime environments. It provides a modular platform for designing, prototyping, and evaluating kernel components such as schedulers, memory managers, and device drivers in a controlled, extensible environment.

The project aims to bridge theoretical ideas with practical implementations by offering a common workspace where researchers and practitioners can compare approaches across different kernel architectures, including monolithic, microkernel, and hybrid designs.

The architecture centers on a kernel-agnostic core and a plugin layer that can host components such as schedulers, memory policies, I/O subsystems, and file systems.

It includes a hardware abstraction layer to run experiments on diverse hardware configurations and a set of tooling for tracing, logging, benchmarking, and reproducibility.

The design emphasizes safety, modularity, and reproducible experimentation, with clear interfaces to minimize coupling between components. Kernidea is used in OS research and teaching. Laboratories use it to prototype novel scheduling strategies, memory management techniques, or device-driver interactions, and to compare performance and correctness against reference implementations.

The project is community-driven, with open contribution guidelines and governance that emphasizes documentation, testing, and peer review. Licensing is typically open-source to encourage collaboration. Reception has been mixed: it is valued as a flexible sandbox for kernel experimentation but can be complex for newcomers and is best suited to controlled research environments. This broader field includes concepts such as kernel, operating system, microkernel, monolithic kernel, kernel module, and formal verification.