Sadly, Alex Ionescu (the developer you mentioned) dropped the tinykrnl project when he left for MS. It was a completely source-compatible, reverse-engineered reimplementation of the NT kernel, which had a lot of promise for everything from education to security research. But in going to MS, he killed the project and the few other developers (including myself, although I did very little) all went in different directions.
That's one of the projects I most regret seeing die. One day when I actually have free time, maybe I'll start it back up. Amazingly, it was very simple to work on, there's just a lot to do; anyone with a basic knowledge of x86 assembly and how `cl' works could jump into it fairly easily, since it was hand-decompiled line for line from the existing source, then commented from there. There were no problems to solve (a good or bad thing, depending on your perspective), since it was directly taken from the existing kernel and drivers.
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Sadly, Alex Ionescu (the developer you mentioned) dropped the tinykrnl project when he left for MS. It was a completely source-compatible, reverse-engineered reimplementation of the NT kernel, which had a lot of promise for everything from education to security research. But in going to MS, he killed the project and the few other developers (including myself, although I did very little) all went in different directions.
That's one of the projects I most regret seeing die. One day when I actually have free time, maybe I'll start it back up. Amazingly, it was very simple to work on, there's just a lot to do; anyone with a basic knowledge of x86 assembly and how `cl' works could jump into it fairly easily, since it was hand-decompiled line for line from the existing source, then commented from there. There were no problems to solve (a good or bad thing, depending on your perspective), since it was directly taken from the existing kernel and drivers.