// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Rocky Linux Creator Built a New "Not Linux" Kernel in 11 Days Using AI
Gregory Kurtzer is no stranger to the Linux world. He created CentOS, and when Red Hat messed it up, he started Rocky Linux as the community replacement. He also co-founded CIQ, the company offering enterprise support around Rocky.
His latest project has nothing to do with rebuilding another Linux distro, though. He has built an entirely new operating system kernel, and he didn't write most of the code himself. An AI agent did.
The project is called Ginux. It's an independent, Rust-first x86-64 kernel. Which simply means it is NOT a fork of the Linux kernel.
It has its own memory management, scheduler, process model, filesystems, networking, and device support, all written from scratch.
The most interesting part is that even though it is not Linux, it is Linux-compatible. Ginux implements the Linux ABI (the binary interface compiled programs use to talk to the kernel), so existing Linux binaries can run on it unmodified.
In the project's own terms, Linux is a "personality" that Ginux exposes, not the kernel running underneath.
Now, the name Ginux may sound like a mix of GNU and Linux. I hate to disappoint you, it is not the case here.
The G in Ginux stands for GPT. Greg. Kurtzer jokes in the README that, to keep his ego within limits, the G officially stands for GPT. Why GPT? Because it was coded entirely by (Chat) GPT 5.6 Sol.
Here's how Kurtzer announced it on X (formerly known as Twitter):
In 11 days, I built a new Linux-compatible operating system kernel that boots Rocky Linux 10 with systemd, all using Human-Directed Agentic Engineering (HDAE).I call it Ginux. It is an independent, Rust-first x86-64 kernel (not a Linux fork) with its own memory management, boot…