A QNX-inspired operating system with selectable kernels

QSOE

A QNX-inspired operating system with selectable kernels.

News: QSOE 0.1 is out — the first public release of the unified two-kernel system (June 2026). Read the announcement →

QSOE ships in two variants that share one userspace and one build system. QSOE/N runs on Skimmer, a microkernel written from scratch for this project (SMP by design); QSOE/L runs on seL4 as its kernel.

Both variants, when compiled, offer the kernel and initrd files directly usable in e.g. U-Boot loader. The userspace is 100% identical across both variants; the only parts produced per-kernel are taskman , the task manager, and libc.so — the C library, which is around 85% shared at the source level and diverges only at the thin layer where it meets the kernel.

The design follows the QNX Neutrino tradition: a small kernel with everything else in userspace, synchronous message-passing IPC, and the resource-manager model for services.

QSOE targets 64-bit RISC-V ( RV64 , Sv39 ) on the SiFive HiFive Unmatched ( FU740 ), with QEMU used for day-to-day development. Both QSOE variants now boot on real hardware. Released under Apache-2.0.