I need a very tiny open-source kernel(the tiniest you know) with at least a console i/o with/without GUI that I could compile into object code and load it into RAM using a simple bootloader(that I already have). the goal is to be able to do read/write to the disk from within the kernel. Any suggestions?
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FreeRTOS might be worth a look. Plenty of supported platforms, small footprint. The free version is GPL which will probably hinder any closed source development you might want to do, but there are commercial releases with much more liberal licenses you could use if you were willing to pay up.
ucLinux is slightly more heaviweight, but can still work on systems without MMUs. I’ve never actually tried to deploy this one myself, I’ve only used systems that already had a suitable image available for them (old Gumstix board).
If you’re going to target x86 you can go for something a bit more substantial. The MicroCore variant of Tiny Core Linux will demand a few megabytes of RAM.