The big picture: Writing an operating system kernel from scratch typically requires years of work from a team of experienced engineers. Gregory Kurtzer, co-founder of CentOS and later Rocky Linux, says he just built one in 11 days — mostly by having an AI agent write the code. Even without Linux code underneath, its new kernel can already boot Rocky Linux 10. However, it is still a research prototype.
Kurtzer introduced the Ginux kernel on X last week. The code is also available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. The name combines Linux, GPT and Greg. The README jokes that the G officially stands for GPT to keep the author’s ego in check.
Despite the name, Ginux is not a fork of Linux. Everything from memory management and scheduling to file systems and networking has been written from scratch, mostly in Rust. What it has in common with Linux is the ABI, so unmodified Linux programs can run on it unmodified.
The README file describes Linux as a “personality” that the kernel presents to the software. This is the only one built so far, although BSD is being considered as a possibility later.
But even this one personality still has many gaps. Of the 375 system calls in Linux 6.12’s x86-64 interface, Ginux only fully implements 82. Another 245 only function partially. The remaining 48 are intentionally blocked.
Software on Ginux runs in isolated “domains,” each with its own processes, memory, and file system. The project sees this as a stronger boundary than containers, although Ginux still pulls standard OCI container images to compose each domain’s files. This is how Rocky Linux 10 achieves the multi-user goal of systemd.
In a technical report, Kurtzer calls his approach human-directed agentic engineering. He set the architecture, milestones and passing criteria himself. The agent took care of the rest, from writing the code, booting the kernel, testing, and fixing the bugs.
All of this ran as a single long-running OpenAI Codex task using GPT-5.6 Sol. Over the 11 days, approximately 139,000 lines of code and tests were created with more than 1,000 commits. Real-world distributions like Rocky Linux have also uncovered bugs that escaped the project’s synthetic tests.
Nevertheless, Ginux is initially purely a research project. No one has independently verified its security. It also resides entirely in a QEMU virtual machine, as there is no support for physical hardware, GPUs, or NVMe drives. Kurtzer himself says that AI can now write complex system software, but things like compatibility, security and long-term maintenance “remain the real divide.”
In the meantime, Linux developers have become familiar with AI. Last month, Linus Torvalds had Claude Code write a series of experimental page cache patches. The reviewers soon discovered a racing condition in it, so the work is still under review. Around the same time, kernel maintainers agreed to no longer require contributors to disclose AI-powered code.
