Munal OS
Infrastructure
experimental operating system
SHOW HN2025
How HN took it
18 positive, 27 neutral or asking, 2 mixed, 2 critical, out of 49 comments about the project. Thread score +0.38.
Idea: 7 for, 0 againstDesign: 1 for, 1 againstPrivacy: 1 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Impressive and inspiring unikernel design with WASM sandboxing
From 4 comments
This is incredible. I wonder if this will be the future of OSes. This readme is really, really interesting to read through. Why did you use wasmi instead of wasmtime? I might…
9d on HNFun project. The grey beards will gladly read how is it qualitatively different from early Windows or maybe even AmigaOS Workbench? The dinosaurs will probably point to bytecode…
baq on HNThis is just so inspirational and cool. I’ve had so many of these concepts floating around in my head, without the critically necessary capability, or followthrough. I’m sure…
n42 on HNThis is a very good bucking of conventional wisdom. Good job! Now that Redox aims to support WASI too, it would be interesting to see if the syscall interfaces of these two can…
Ericson2314 on HN
Radial menu design praised
From 1 comment
The radial menu is brilliant. It is reminiscent of how basic team communication works in StarCraft 2. You alt-click to ping the minimap (draw allies' attention to something in…
rollcat on HN
Built-in browser noted as impressive
From 2 comments
Wow, this thing even has its own web browser! https://github.com/Askannz/munal-os/tree/master/wasm_apps/web_browser You can see a snippet of it running (and rendering Hacker…
simonw on HNthis is very impressive. I really like that you have a browser which is almost mandatory for a desktop OS now. You should write down your TODO list and I hope you keep working on…
knowitnone on HN
Objections
Cooperative scheduling means each app slows as more are open
From 1 comment
> The downside of course is that each step of the loop is not allowed to hold the CPU for arbitrary amounts of time, and must explicitly yield for long-running tasks. Seems to me…
9d on HN
Spectre and memory isolation without virtual memory questioned
From 1 comment
Apart from the cooperative scheduling, I think Spectre probably kills the security model, and I can't understand how this could work efficiently without virtual memory. How do…
IshKebab on HN
Runs only on VirtIO, not real hardware
From 1 comment
Pretty cool! > The reliance on VirtIO means Munal OS does not support running on real hardware yet I think if you wanted to run it on HW, instead of running adding drivers to it…
bjackman on HN
Requests
Explain project motivation and high-level design
From 1 comment
Not an export in OS. Can op explain the project motivation and high-level design a bit? The readme file seems to be a feature introduction and barely touches the motivations,…
LYK-love on HN
Quantify performance benefits of the design
From 1 comment
> It's an unikernel design that is compiled as a single EFI binary and does not use virtual address spaces for process isolation. Are you able to quantify what kind of…
nnx on HN
Questions
Why wasmi instead of wasmtime
From 1 comment
This is incredible. I wonder if this will be the future of OSes. This readme is really, really interesting to read through. Why did you use wasmi instead of wasmtime? I might…
9d on HN
How memory.grow works without virtual memory
From 1 comment
Apart from the cooperative scheduling, I think Spectre probably kills the security model, and I can't understand how this could work efficiently without virtual memory. How do…
IshKebab on HN
Alternatives named
Redox OS (WASI support)
From 1 comment
This is a very good bucking of conventional wisdom. Good job! Now that Redox aims to support WASI too, it would be interesting to see if the syscall interfaces of these two can…
Ericson2314 on HN
Mempo project
From 1 comment
Reminds me of project mempo from like 10 years ago
jasonfrost on HN
Lisp machines and Smalltalk environments
From 1 comment
Fun project. The grey beards will gladly read how is it qualitatively different from early Windows or maybe even AmigaOS Workbench? The dinosaurs will probably point to bytecode…
baq on HN