Akaros® is an open source, GPL-licensed operating system for manycore architectures. Our goal is to provide support for parallel and high-performance applications and to scale to a large number of cores.

The Akaros repository contains a mix of code from different projects across a few top-level directories. The kernel is in kern, userspace libraries are in user/, and a variety of tools can be found in tools/, including the toolchain.

The Akaros Kernel:

The Akaros kernel is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2. Our kernel is made up of code from a number of other systems. Anything written for the Akaros kernel is licensed "GPLv2 or later". However, other code, such as from Linux and Plan 9, are licensed GPLv2, without the "or later" clause. There is also code from BSD, Xen, JOS, and Plan 9 derivatives. As a whole, the kernel is licensed GPLv2.

Note that the Plan 9 code that is a part of Akaros is also licensed under the Lucent Public License. The University of California, Berkeley, has been authorised by Alcatel-Lucent to release all Plan 9 software previously governed by the Lucent Public License, Version 1.02 under the GNU General Public License, Version 2. Akaros derives its Plan 9 code from this UCB release. For more information, see here.

User Space Libraries and Tools:

Our user code is likewise from a mix of sources. All code written for Akaros, such as user/parlib/, is licensed under the GNU LGPLv2.1, or later. Plan 9 libraries, including user/iplib and user/ndblib are licensed under the LGPLv2.1, but without the "or later". See each library for details.

Likewise, tools/ is a collection of various code. All of our contributions to existing code bases, such as GCC, glibc, and busybox, are licensed under their respective projects' licenses.