xv6 resource

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases no_license

Adoption not part of the score

10267 stars · 4167 forks observed · 2026-08-28

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

Xv6 is a small re-implementation of Unix Version 6 written in ANSI C for a modern RISC-V multiprocessor, maintained by MIT PDOS. It serves as the teaching operating system for MIT's 6.1810 operating systems engineering course.

Use cases

• learn how an operating system kernel works
• study a simple Unix-like kernel source code
• teach an operating systems course
• experiment with syscalls, page tables, and file systems in a kernel
• run a minimal OS in QEMU for OS development practice

When to choose

• you want a small, readable codebase for learning OS internals
• you are following MIT 6.1810 or a similar OS course
• you want to modify a real kernel without Linux's complexity

When to avoid

• you need a production or general-purpose operating system
• you need broad hardware support or modern OS features
• you want a non-RISC-V target without porting effort

Facets

learning-resource · maturity active

interpreter developer-tools operating-systems education tutorials cross-platform cpp teaching-os unix-v6 risc-v qemu kernel educational operating-systems linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="mit-pdos/xv6-riscv")