LibreNT – how AI slop infects Windows clean-room engineering

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LiberNT is a free NT operating system, built out of love for the NT architecture. The name says it: liber is Latin for free. LiberNT targets Windows® 11 compatibility, with room for freestyle and experimental features.

LiberNT is based on ReactOS, the Open Source effort to develop an operating system that is compatible with applications and drivers written for the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems. It is a fork with extensive changes to kernel-space components and drivers, aimed at stability and modern hardware, and it focuses on 64-bit platforms: amd64, arm64 and riscv64.

Our goal is a system that stays maintainable in the long run: stable, reliable and efficient, running on embedded devices too, and able to support every feature a modern operating system should have.

LiberNT is licensed under the GNU GPL 3.0. Code inherited from ReactOS keeps the licence stated in its file headers, most of it GPL 2.0 or later. The GPL 2.0, LGPL 2.1 and BSD texts those files refer to are in COPYING2, COPYING.LIB and COPYING.ARM.

The changes made in LiberNT are Copyright © 2026 the LiberNT contributors. Code inherited from ReactOS and from third parties keeps the copyright notices of its authors. See CREDITS.md.

So far, LiberNT has proven more stable and faster than ReactOS in CPU management, memory management and I/O resource handling. Windows 11 is the compatibility reference.

We want LiberNT to be a free NT operating system that everyone can rely on, every day. Support our goal by donating or by joining our new community. See Contributing to get started.

LiberNT would not exist without ReactOS. With all our respect and gratitude to the ReactOS Team & Contributors, whose work LiberNT builds on, you can find the upstream source code at github.com/reactos/reactos.

LiberNT builds with RosBE, a cross-build toolchain. The steps below work on Linux and macOS, and on Windows through WSL2.

You need Git, CMake, Ninja and a C/C++ compiler for your own machine. RosBE adds the compilers that build LiberNT.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ahmedarif193/winget-rosbe/main/rosbe-unix-bootstrap.sh | sh

On Windows, we suggest WSL2. Install it with wsl --install, open the Linux terminal it adds, and follow the Linux steps there. Keep the source inside the Linux file system rather than under /mnt/c, where builds run slower.

git clone https://github.com/ahmedarif193/LiberNT.git cd LiberNT

The first configure run also fetches the submodule and external sources the build needs.

./configure.sh

With no options, this sets up an AMD64 Debug build with Clang in the folder output-Clang-amd64-debug. The folder name always follows the pattern output-<compiler>-<architecture>-<debug|release>.

./configure.sh -a arm64 # ARM64 Debug build with Clang ./configure.sh -a i386 --gcc # 32-bit x86 build with GCC ./configure.sh -a amd64 --release # optimized AMD64 build

For a more personalized build, add menuconfig:

./configure.sh menuconfig

It opens a menu, much like the Linux kernel's, where you choose the target, compiler and build type, and switch features on or off: code generation and tuning, graphics driver model and Mesa, WoW64 and FEX, kernel debugging, test runs and more. Press ? on any option for help, S to save and Q to quit. Your choices are saved in the output folder and used every time you configure it again.

Go to the output folder and run Ninja with the target you want:

cd output-Clang-amd64-debug ninja liberntimg

Command Creates Use it to

ninja bootcd bootcd.iso Install LiberNT from a CD image, in a virtual machine or on a PC.

ninja liberntimg LiberNT.img Boot a disk with LiberNT already installed. Start it in a virtual machine such as QEMU, or write it to a USB drive or SD card. It boots with UEFI or BIOS.

ninja liberntvhd LiberNT.vhd Use the same preinstalled disk in virtual machines that take VHD disks, such as Hyper-V and VirtualBox.

Each target builds everything it needs first, and the files are written to the output folder.

LiberNT brings modern hardware and platforms to the NT architecture. The current focus is:

See INSTALL.md for installation instructions.

Report bugs and suggest features in Issues, and find guides and notes in the Wiki.

See CONTRIBUTING.md and PULL_REQUEST_MANAGEMENT.md.

Legal notice: If you have seen proprietary Microsoft Windows source code (including but not limited to the leaked Windows NT 3.5, NT 4, 2000 source code and the Windows Research Kernel), your contribution won't be accepted because of potential copyright violation.

We want to make it clear: AI is part of how LiberNT is built. It helps us review and write code, and everything it writes is then reviewed by a human. Before anything reaches the main branch, a person runs and validates the end-to-end tests. We care about this project too much to let a regression slip through.

It also helps us read documentation, extract definitions and fix bugs. For any given bug, it compares what the official Microsoft Learn documentation says with what our function actually does, so we can see exactly where our behavior differs.

Like any other tool, AI is there to help us achieve our goals. It follows the same rules we hold ourselves to, set out in AGENTS.md:

If you use AI in your own contributions, you are welcome here too. Just tell us in the pull request which parts it helped with and how you tested them. That honesty is all we ask.