Nanos is a kernel designed to run a single application in a virtualized environment.
Nanos addresses the overhead and complexity of running general-purpose operating systems for workloads that need only one application. Rather than providing a full OS with multi-process support, user management, and remote administration, it strips away these features to create a minimal kernel tailored for virtualized single-application deployment. The approach treats the entire virtual machine as dedicated to one program, eliminating the resource costs and security surface area of unnecessary OS features.
Nanos suits microservices, edge computing, and sandbox scenarios where you want to isolate a single workload with minimal overhead. The project recommends using the ops build tool for most users rather than working directly with the kernel, as ops provides sensible defaults and handles deployment to public clouds including AWS, GCE, and Azure. Direct kernel modification is only necessary if you plan to change Nanos itself. The tool supports hardware acceleration via KVM on Linux and HVF on macOS, though it can run without acceleration in other virtualization environments at reduced performance.
Development activity shows consistent engagement with the codebase. The project maintains active example repositories demonstrating real-world usage patterns. Build infrastructure supports multiple architectures and platforms, with separate toolchain setup documented for Intel and ARM-based macOS systems as well as Linux. The kernel is written in C and includes a test suite covering runtime behavior across different scenarios.
