Greg Kurtzer releases Ginux userspace kernel
The gist
CentOS founder Greg Kurtzer's AI-assisted Ginux kernel now runs as a userspace process on top of Linux.
The pivot drops kernel replacement for syscall control and AI-agent containment research.
How it unfolded
- Oct 27, 2026Kurtzer announced on X that in 11 days he built a Linux-compatible kernel, Ginux, that boots Rocky Linux 10 with systemd, using Human-Directed Agentic Engineering.
- Oct 28, 2026Ginux was unveiled as an experimental Rust kernel developed with AI assistance, designed to run existing Linux userspace applications without relying on the Linux kernel.
- Oct 2026The roughly 139,000-line kernel, produced by one persistent OpenAI Codex task under Kurtzer's direction, booted through UEFI and brought up Rocky Linux 10's systemd in QEMU.
Key terms
- userspace
- The memory region in an operating system where ordinary application programs run, separated from the protected kernel space.
- syscall
- A programmatic interface through which a program requests services from the operating system kernel.
- UEFI
- A specification for the firmware that runs first when a computer is powered on, before the operating system.
Source: Wikipedia