Microvisor | Devpost

Inspiration

While we hack in comfortable rooms full of powerful laptops, free cloud credits, and gourmet meals; there are still millions in the world who don’t have that privilege.

Modern computing is hungry. Use-cases such as Blockchain & ML continue to gobble up more RAM, CPU, GPU, etc. Not everyone has access to a shiny Apple Macbook. Software reproducibility, portability, and efficiency such that computing works for everyone has been advocated as possible by the following research foundations:

Linus Torvalds – Linux: A Portable Operating System
Eelco Dolstra – The Purely Functional Software Deployment Model (Nix)
Barrelfish (Microsoft Research) – The Multikernel Paper

This project is also a small tribute to the hard-working kernel maintainers at the FreeBSD foundation, the Linux foundation, and the Nix+Nixpkgs+NixOS ecosystem who quietly keep the digital world running. We hope our work can grow enough to earn their attention.

What it does

Microvisor is a unified environment that makes the kernel disappear into the background.

It gives the same consistent user experience — the same configs, services, and tooling — across:

Almost any & all Linux distributions, including Arch Linux, Raspberry Pi, & Android
FreeBSD
macOS

The result: a user can jump between systems and almost forget what kernel they’re actually on. It’s reliable, reproducible, and declarative — powered by Nix flakes in tandem with the corresponding package managers of the partner OS.

How we built it

We configured everything:

bootloaders and partitions
services and daemons
fonts, userspace programs, constants
ssh IPs and network targets

All stitched together under a single declaratively architected setup. It’s like a multikernel system, but instead of writing a new kernel, we made the userland so incredibly unified and reproducible that the underlying kernel barely matters for ourselves.

Challenges we ran into

Time: 32 hours isn’t enough to touch kernel code safely.
Knowledge gaps: many teammates hadn’t seen low-level OS concepts, so we had to backfill a lot of basics before pushing forward.
Complexity: juggling Linux, macOS, Android, and FreeBSD at once is no small task.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

We built something that feels seamless to use across completely different kernels.
We made it reproducible and reliable — two words that are rarely true at hackathons.
We got to teach people how operating systems really work, not just how to spin up web servers.

What we learned

No amount of hardware is enough hardware.
The kernel is the foundation, but it’s the userland that most people live in.
Reproducibility is freedom: if you can rebuild it anywhere, you can share it with anyone.

What’s next for Microvisor

Explore actual kernel-level integrations (adapting to kernel features dynamically).
Treat machines as nodes in a “distributed OS fabric,” inspired by Barrelfish.
Reach out to the Linux Foundation, the NixOS Foundation, and the FreeBSD Foundation — because the future of computing belongs to everyone, not just those who can afford the biggest servers.

Microvisor is just a beginning. What we want most is to bring it to light.