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One of the first Vibecoded Operating Systems, and Lightweight.

9 starsC

BananaOS, vibecoded operating system that boots on a 486 with ~11MB RAM

by madamdo·Feb 27, 2026·11 points·5 comments
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AI Analysis

●●SolidWizardryBig BrainCozy

10-year-old ships a bootable OS on 486 hardware with a real GUI—ambitious constraint craftsmanship.

Strengths
  • •Genuinely constrained target (11MB RAM, 486 CPU) forces real kernel engineering trade-offs
  • •Custom window manager with movable/resizable windows demonstrates non-trivial systems design
  • •CI/CD pipeline produces bootable images on commit—professional infrastructure for hobbyist project
Weaknesses
  • •Audience is niche (systems learners only); most users won't boot or run this in practice
  • •No network stack, filesystem persistence, or multi-tasking limits practical utility beyond education
Category
Open Source
Target Audience

Students learning low-level systems programming, hobbyist OS developers, educators teaching computer architecture

Similar To

OSDev.org projects · Raspberry Pi bare-metal OS projects · MineOS

Post Description

My 10-year-old son has been deep in low-level rabbit holes lately and ended up vibe-coding his own operating system. Since he’s still a kid and not on HN himself, I’m posting this on his behalf with his permission.

This started as curiosity about how computers actually boot, and somehow escalated into writing a kernel, building a GUI, and setting up CI that produces a bootable OS image on every commit.

BananaOS is a small experimental operating system built mainly for learning and exploration of low-level systems programming. It currently targets i386 BIOS systems and is designed to run on extremely constrained hardware. Fun fact: Wallpaper logic, one of the most important OS functionalities, is directly implemented in the kernel. That cracked my son up!

Some highlights:

Multiboot-compliant kernel loaded via GRUB

VESA framebuffer graphics with double buffering

Custom window manager with movable and resizable windows

Dock-style application launcher

PS/2 keyboard and mouse input handling

PCI enumeration and AHCI SATA support

Basic applications (terminal, notepad, calculator, file explorer, settings)

Memory detection and allocation based on available RAM

Boots in QEMU with about 11.2 MB RAM

Includes an ISR workaround to emulate CMOV so it can boot on Intel 486 CPUs

One thing I found particularly fun: he also added GitHub Actions workflows that automatically build the OS image for every commit, so the repo continuously produces fresh bootable artifacts.

The project is very much experimental and should only be run inside an Virtual Machine.

Repo (with build instructions and screenshots):

https://github.com/Banaxi-Tech/BananaOS

Quick start (only on Linux, check dependencies, and see README):

git clone https://github.com/Banaxi-Tech/BananaOS cd BananaOS make qemu-system-i386 -cdrom bananaos.img -m 128M

Retro mode:

qemu-system-i386 -cpu 486 -cdrom bananaos.img -m 11.2M

He’s mainly building this to understand kernels, memory management, drivers, and how operating systems actually work below user space.

Feedback from people who have built hobby operating systems or worked close to hardware would be especially appreciated.

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