maestro: Lightweight, Linux-compatible kernel, written in Rust

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Summary

Maestro is a lightweight Unix-like kernel written in Rust, aiming for safety and Linux compatibility. Currently supports x86 and x86_64 architectures with many features but still in early development.

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Cached at: 06/24/26, 01:52 AM

maestro-os/maestro

Source: https://github.com/maestro-os/maestro

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AGPL-3.0 license Version Rust toolchain Continuous integration Stars Discord

About

Maestro is a lightweight Unix-like kernel written in Rust.

The goal is to provide a lightweight operating system able to use the safety features of the Rust language to be reliable.

This project is still in early stage development, thus it is highly unstable and misses a lot of features. Do not use it in production!

To stay updated with the project, follow the blog!

neofetch

Neofetch and bash running on the OS.

Features

CPU architectures support

ArchitectureStatus
x86_64
x86
AArch64📅
  • Supported
  • 📅 Planned (not currently supported)

The following features are currently implemented (non-exhaustive):

  • Linux’s system calls (roughly 30% are currently implemented)
  • Kernel modules
  • Drivers
    • PS/2 keyboard (includes forward compatibility with USB keyboards)
    • IDE/PATA
    • NVMe
  • PCI devices enumeration
  • Basic ACPI support
  • Memory management
    • Buddy allocator
    • Internal memory allocator, with similarities with dlmalloc’s implementation
    • Per-process virtual memory
    • Over committing
    • Copy-on-Write
    • Page cache
  • Unix processes
  • Unix files
    • Virtual FileSystem (VFS) with mountpoints
    • Filesystem (ext2 only)
    • Disk partitions (MBR and GPT)
    • Virtual filesystems (/tmp and /proc)
    • initramfs (cpio)
    • Unix pipes and sockets
    • Device files
  • ELF programs
  • Terminal
  • Clocks

Quickstart

This repository is not a full operating system in itself but only the kernel.

You can either:

  • Use the installer to build a full operating system from an ISO file
  • Build the OS by hand. For this, you can check the kernel’s book

The OS can then be run by a virtual machine such a QEMU or VirtualBox, or on a physical machine.

Build

To build and/or run the OS, cd into the kernel’s crate:

cd kernel/

Then follow the instructions in README.md

Documentation

The kernel’s book contains general information on how to use the kernel.

mdbook and mdbook-mermaid are required:

cargo install mdbook mdbook-mermaid

Build the book with:

mdbook-mermaid install doc/
mdbook build doc/

Then, it can be accessed at doc/book/index.html.

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