My friend was part of a group of students who decided to write XOmB. They just apparently decided it would be a neat project, now it's a pretty cool exokernel:
http://xomb.net/index.php?title=Main_Page
Not only are we working on XOmB, (pronounced 'zombie') but we extracted all of the stuff "from power on 'till kmain" and called it XOmB Bare Bones, so that other people who want to write kernels in D don't have to worry about that ugliness: http://wiki.xomb.org/index.php?title=XOmB_Bare_Bones
That is great to hear. I've heard a few stories on how painful that stuff was to track down and write. Bring up always sucks. This sounds like an excellent way for people to dig into writing kernels without forcing people to write all the bootup code before they can do anything.
How do you do device handoff? Are people restricted to an exokernel model or can they handoff to a macrokernel kexec style?
(VMware used to use the Linux kernel to take care of init before they wrote it themselves, so there's definitely a need for this type of thing, even beyond hobbyist.)
In classic exokernel fashion... you have a choice! Someone can write a libos to handle that stuff however they'd like, or you can just go do the work yourself.
