I'm very happy to see people are still doing this sort of thing! I've always wanted to see something of a truly 'barebones' OS; but one that could at least get

I'm very happy to see people are still doing this sort of thing! I've always wanted to see something of a truly 'barebones' OS; but one that could at least get you 64-bit mode, OpenGL ES, audio output, USB polling and network connectivity with libc available. Yet not be as complex and large as Linux/BSD. Being able to run a real-time application with no pre-emption, no virtual memory protections, no kernel transitions, etc could probably eke out an additional ~20-30% of performance on a CPU-bound application. Plus the near-instant boot would be great for media players, emulator arcade boxes, etc. Probably just not possible, due to the driver situation. There was a bit of hope UEFI could lead to better drivers for hardware prior to boot, but efforts around things like GOP (graphics output protocol) haven't really gone anywhere that I've seen. Sadly, there's a very small amount of modern things you can do with 32-bit mode, VESA and a keyboard. I've never even found a video card with a 1920x1080 VESA display mode; they're almost exclusively still 4:3 only. Plus, no sound rules out gaming and media; no internet (let alone Wifi) rules out any connectivity; no strong filesystem rules out moving data around easily; no USB rules out loading things from external storage, gamepads, etc. Only strong use case would be for embedded; but ARM platforms have this area beat substantially in cost, power, tooling, etc.