Show HN: Crazierl – An Erlang Operating System
by toast0 on 3/29/2026, 8:38:26 PM
Crazierl is an experimental/hobby operating system based around BEAM.<p>I've linked the browser based demo; I don’t recommend using a phone; it does work, slowly, on the phones I tested, but it’s very awkward to use. You can share a link with a hashtag with your friends and click the consent checkbox, and it (should) link up into dist and I’ve also included a chat application you can start with chat:start(). (quit chat with /quit, or use the shell menu with ctrl-g to switch between shells etc).<p>The browser demo relies on the v86 javascript x86 virtual machine. You can also run Crazierl on a real x86 system, but I’ve had mixed luck on modern systems, it uses some esoteric legacy VGA features and support for that isn’t getting better.<p>Crazierl is fairly limited: 32-bit x86, BIOS boot, only two NIC drivers virtio-net and realtek 8168. But it's got enough to become part of an Erlang dist cluster. It also supports SMP, but it’s crashy with high core counts in qemu; there’s almost certainly several concurrency bugs in the kernel. There's also a lot of excess tcp debug spew (sorry).<p>Source code is available (Apache) <a href="https://github.com/russor/crazierl/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/russor/crazierl/</a>
Comments
by: tombert
I've thought about doing something like this but I am only very recently getting into low-level OS stuff.<p>I can't remember who said this, but they called "Erlang an operating system for your code", and I think that's fairly accurate. When I build an Erlang app, I don't build it the same way as I would with Rust; I have a lot of independent gen_servers that do operate independent from each other.<p>The Erlang VM is (roughly) preemptive multitasking, and even each process has its own GC, so it does feel like it could be a natural fit for its own operating system without having to live on top of Linux.
3/29/2026, 9:44:27 PM
by: lightandlight
> browser-based demo<p>Wait, so is the browser running a JavaScript build of Qemu? /
3/29/2026, 10:56:42 PM
by: mixedbit
Is the OS implemented from scratch, or is it a stripped down version of some existing OS?
3/29/2026, 8:50:34 PM