The Inferno operating system released in 1996 does this. It was designed to run on anything from light weight mmu-less bare metal embedded with no graphics to

The Inferno operating system released in 1996 does this. It was designed to run on anything from light weight mmu-less bare metal embedded with no graphics to full fledged PC class hardware. It included a hosted mode where the kernel is built as a program that runs on plan 9, unix, unix-likes, and windows. The kernel is a vm with no way to implement native code unless you add it to the kernel. Since everything runs in the dis vm you can have a truly portable os where the same program that runs on a headless embedded mips box will run unmodified in hosted inferno on an x86 Linux machine. Unfortunately it does not yet run on x86-64 due to dis having hard coded 32bit constraints. However, someone is actively working on that little issue. http://inferno-os.org/ http://inferno-os.org/ A fork that aims to make inferno easier to run out of the box and develop on: https://code.9front.org/hg/purgatorio/ https://code.9front.org/hg/purgatorio/