How miniOS began: chasing real-time latency in userspace

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0200

I recently published miniOS on GitHub, a hobby x86_64 kernel I’ve been poking at on and off for years. Docs are here if you want the technical deep-dive. But before miniOS was a kernel with SMP scheduling and a network stack, it was a small test harness I wrote during university to answer one specific question.

The question

Back then, Xenomai and RTLinux already existed, and both gave you hard real-time guarantees by running your time-critical code as a kernel task, next to (or underneath) a regular Linux kernel. That works, but it means your real-time code has to live in kernel space, with everything that implies for development, debugging, and safety.

Real-Time on Christian Spoo

How miniOS began: chasing real-time latency in userspace

The question