The Montauk Operating System

MontaukOS is an operating system written in modern C++. It runs on bare metal and supports various applications, including DOOM, a Wikipedia client, and standard desktop utilities.

Features

• Modern preemptive multitasking kernel
• Multi-user userspace with desktop environment and command line
• PCI-e support and drivers for Intel GPU and e100e Ethernet for graphics and networking on real hardware
• ACPI support with AML interpreter, including S3 sleep and ACPI shutdown
• Support for USB including input devices (keyboard/mouse), along with PS/2 input support
• Support for Intel High Definition (HDA) audio devices
• Userspace and kernel audio support
• Support for (some) Intel Bluetooth devices, userspace Bluetooth management app
• Support for the GPT partition table
• VFS using numbered drive identifiers with support for ext2 and FAT32 filesystems
• Support for AHCI and NVMe SSD drives
• Support for UEFI Runtime Services, including power management calls (shutdown/reboot)
• Customizable desktop environment with 12+ graphical apps, including a terminal emulator, file manager, Wikipedia client, weather app, DOOM, and more
• Modern icon pack (Flat Remix) used in desktop environment
• Support for TrueType font, JPEG image, and SVG icon rendering
• Networking including TCP/IP stack, UDP, DNS, DHCP and TLS via BearSSL
• Command-line IRC client
• Live viewable kernel log from GUI
• Mandelbrot set renderer
• PDF viewer app with full support for text (inc. baked-in TrueType fonts) and some graphics
• Userspace Music app with support for MP3 and WAV files
• 2D game engine and demo game with fantasy tileset

Goal

The goal of the MontaukOS project is to create a modern and unique operating system that runs on both emulators and on real hardware. The kernel and included userspace applications are written in modern C++.

History and methodology

Development started in early 2025, as a hand-written toy kernel. The first published Git commit was on Feb 27, 2025. In early 2026, Claude Opus 4.6 began being used to accelerate development of the kernel and userspace.