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Brutal

๐Ÿข An operating system inspired by brutalist design that combines the ideals of UNIX from the 1970s with modern technology and engineering

From brutal-orgยทUpdated June 1, 2026ยทView on GitHubยท

Striking modernist shapes and bold use of modern C are the hallmarks of BRUTAL. Inspired by brutalist design BRUTAL combines the ideals of UNIX from the 1970s with modern technology and engineering. The project is written primarily in C, distributed under the MIT License license, first published in 2021. It has gained significant community traction with 1,105 stars and 42 forks on GitHub. Key topics include: c, hobby-os, kernel, microkernel, modern-c.

Latest release: milestone-4โ€” Milestone 4: Capabilities and Graphics

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<br/> <p align="center"> Striking modernist shapes and bold use of modern C are the hallmarks of <b>BRUTAL</b>.<br> Inspired by brutalist design <b>BRUTAL</b> combines the ideals of UNIX from the 1970s<br> with modern technology and engineering. </p> <br/>

BRUTAL

<a href="https://github.com/brutal-org/brutal/issues"> <img src="https://img.shields.io/github/issues/brutal-org/brutal"> </a> <a href="https://github.com/brutal-org/brutal/network"> <img src="https://img.shields.io/github/forks/brutal-org/brutal"> </a> <a href="https://github.com/brutal-org/brutal/stargazers"> <img src="https://img.shields.io/github/stars/brutal-org/brutal"> </a> <a href="https://github.com/brutal-org/brutal/blob/main/license"> <img src="https://img.shields.io/github/license/brutal-org/brutal"> </a> <a href="https://codecov.io/gh/brutal-org/brutal"><img src="https://codecov.io/gh/brutal-org/brutal/branch/main/graph/badge.svg?token=T4R6TEF56Z" alt="codecov"></a> <a href="https://github.com/brutal-org/brutal/actions/workflows/ubuntu.yml"><img src="https://github.com/brutal-org/brutal/actions/workflows/ubuntu.yml/badge.svg" alt="Build and Test (Ubuntu)"></a> <a href="https://github.com/brutal-org/brutal/actions/workflows/darwin.yml"><img src="https://github.com/brutal-org/brutal/actions/workflows/darwin.yml/badge.svg" alt="Build and Test (Darwin)"></a> <br> <br>
  • BRUTAL is an operating system built from scratch in modern C.
  • BRUTAL is built on top of a capability based micro-kernel.
  • BRUTAL targets x86_64, i686, RISC-V and ARM.
  • BRUTAL exposes its features to developers through clean APIs.
  • BRUTAL features a rich and modern C library complete with fibers, custom allocators, generic data structures, and more...

Screenshots

<p align="center"> <img src="meta/screenshots/2022-03-26.png" /> <br> BRUTAL running in QEMU 6.2 </p>

Build Instructions

BRUTAL is pretty easy to to build from source using GNUMake, NASM and LLVM.

See building.md for more details.

Roadmap

Right now the main goal of brutal is to run doom.

See roadmap.md for more information on how we plan to get there and where you can contribute.

Credits

This project takes inspirations and/or reuse code from the following projects.

See credits.md

License

<a href="https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT"> <img align="right" height="96" alt="MIT License" src="meta/shared/mit-license.png" /> </a>

The brutal operating system and its core components are licensed under the MIT License.

The full text of the license can be accessed via this link and is also included in the license file of this software package.

Contributors

Showing top 12 contributors by commit count.

View all contributors on GitHub โ†’

This article is auto-generated from brutal-org/brutal via the GitHub API.Last fetched: 6/14/2026