asterinas/asterinas

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

4822 stars · 356 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Asterinas is a memory-safe, production-oriented OS kernel written in Rust that implements the Linux ABI, aiming to be a drop-in Linux alternative. It includes OSTD (a Rust OS development foundation), OSDK (a Cargo-like CLI for building Rust OS projects), and Asterinas NixOS, a distribution running the kernel.

Use cases

• run a memory-safe Linux-compatible kernel
• build a Rust OS kernel on a safe foundation
• run workloads inside Intel TDX confidential VMs
• boot NixOS with a Rust kernel instead of Linux
• research kernel fuzzing and memory management
• develop custom OS projects with a Cargo-like toolchain

When to choose

• you need Linux ABI compatibility with memory safety guarantees
• you are doing OS research in Rust
• you target TEE/confidential-computing environments
• you want to experiment with a next-generation kernel

When to avoid

• you need a battle-tested kernel for production workloads today
• you require broad hardware/driver support
• you need non-x86/riscv/loongarch architectures
• you depend on niche Linux features not yet implemented

Facets

application · maturity experimental

security embedded developer-tools operating-systems security developer-tools rust os-kernel rust-os linux-alternative memory-safety tee intel-tdx nixos osdk linux x86

Member repositories

For agents

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