I know this question wasn't directed at me, but as another small OS developer, I'll give you an additional perspective.
I'm developing a kernel (and later an OS around it) called XOmB. It's an exokernel design.
Originally, we started our project as a reason to learn the D language. We were tossing around project ideas, and someone brought up an OS. We started bouncing around some ideas, and we decided that this could actually be a pretty cool project. In addition, the systems space is interesting, because you hear less about it. A lot of people are interested in web apps, or desktop apps, but not nearly as many people are interested in systems. Most of the time, this is due to a supposition that systems are 'too hard for me.' We wanted to help educate others, and try to get more people interested in systems programming.
As far as uniqueness goes, first of all, there hasn't been a real exokernel written yet. The original paper had a small one with it, but it was mostly just for the paper, nothing huge. We're also writing a lot of documentation, and trying to aim it at a beginner. We started a spin-off project named XOmB Bare Bones that does all of the lowest-level work for someone who would want to write an OS in D, letting them jump straight to kmain. About 35 pages of documents were written on this process, with code citations and such... we hope to have our full kernel documented in this way.
If you're interested in checking out the source, we're actually going through a huge code review / restructuring, so the main repo is actually fairly outdated. But until the new version is up to the same feature level as the old, we don't feel comfortable pushing that out. If you'd like to see the new source, it's here: http://github.com/wilkie/xomb/tree/ldc
I'm developing a kernel (and later an OS around it) called XOmB. It's an exokernel design.
Originally, we started our project as a reason to learn the D language. We were tossing around project ideas, and someone brought up an OS. We started bouncing around some ideas, and we decided that this could actually be a pretty cool project. In addition, the systems space is interesting, because you hear less about it. A lot of people are interested in web apps, or desktop apps, but not nearly as many people are interested in systems. Most of the time, this is due to a supposition that systems are 'too hard for me.' We wanted to help educate others, and try to get more people interested in systems programming.
As far as uniqueness goes, first of all, there hasn't been a real exokernel written yet. The original paper had a small one with it, but it was mostly just for the paper, nothing huge. We're also writing a lot of documentation, and trying to aim it at a beginner. We started a spin-off project named XOmB Bare Bones that does all of the lowest-level work for someone who would want to write an OS in D, letting them jump straight to kmain. About 35 pages of documents were written on this process, with code citations and such... we hope to have our full kernel documented in this way.