PatchworkOS: a 64bit non-POSIX OS where everything is a file

https://www.osnews.com/story/142960/patchworkos-a-64bit-non-posix-os-where-everything-is-a-file/

Thom Holwerda Aug 02, 2025 · 1 min read
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Patchwork is a 64-bit monolithic NON-POSIX operating system for the x86_64 architecture that rigorously follows a “everything is a file” philosophy. Built from scratch in C it takes many ideas from Unix, Plan9, DOS and others while simplifying them and sprinkling in some new ideas of its own.

↫ PatchworkOS GitHub page

Patchwork is a surprisingly advanced operating system considering it’s a hobby project. It has multithreading with a constant-time scheduler, fully preemptive mutitasking, SMP, file-based IPC (including pipesshared memorysockets and Plan9 inspired “signals” called notes), and much more. It also uses a Linux-style VFS and has a custom C standard library. On top of that, there’s a modular window manager that supports themes, in which everything is a window, and so much more.

It supports x86_64, but only supports running in RAM. It’s licensed under the MIT license.