Drew DeVault shares the redesign of his microkernel project, now called Hermes, built in the Hare programming language. After his previous microkernel Helios stalled due to design flaws, he spent two years researching OS design, writing a Unix clone (Bunnix), and rethinking core architecture. Hermes introduces symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) with a simple per-CPU work-stealing scheduler under 200 lines of code, a redesigned syscall and IPC ABI, reference counting instead of seL4-style capability derivation graphs for resource management, and a port of the upstream Hare standard library for userspace. The kernel has been tested on roughly ten real hardware devices and a downloadable ISO is available for testing.
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