I've got a hobby OS you may want to check out. Crazierl is a just enough kernel that can run the FreeBSD build of BEAM as a single OS process.
Features include: x86-32 only, bios boot only, SMP capable, drivers in Erlang (there's nifs for managing memory with devices or i/o; and the kernel manages the interrupt controller(s) and has console output before userspace takes over), a kind of working IPv4 stack, dist!
It doesn't run on all my machines, but it does on some (it does some VGA things that I guess aren't well supported and also non uefi is iffy these days too. I typically run it in qemu and v86, but I think it will work in VMWare as well.
If it doesn't take much time, it's worth trying to get it to run in v86; it's so much easier to send people a link to a web page to poke at your OS than to send them an image and tell them to run qemu against it.
Edit: I misinterpretted --- you'll carve your OS up, not mine, that makes more sense!
Old comment: Feel free to carve away, just be aware that just because it's committed doesn't mean it works... I wouldn't take my memory management code, for example. There's some fiddly issues I haven't tracked down because it doesn't break consistently.
I got distracted (story of my life) by something very interesting that takes precedence but I'll return to it at some point, I've made up my mind about that.
v86 has been posted a few times [1], I'm pretty sure that's how I became aware of it to use as a target platform. It's a nice project, and they've taken three PRs from me (so far) that make it easier for me to run my weird OS :) Lots of other contributions here and there from others which is great, because I thought I was going to have to build a virtio-net device in v86 or write a ne2k driver in crazierl, and other people built and debugged the virtio-net so I can just use it.
Features include: x86-32 only, bios boot only, SMP capable, drivers in Erlang (there's nifs for managing memory with devices or i/o; and the kernel manages the interrupt controller(s) and has console output before userspace takes over), a kind of working IPv4 stack, dist!
It doesn't run on all my machines, but it does on some (it does some VGA things that I guess aren't well supported and also non uefi is iffy these days too. I typically run it in qemu and v86, but I think it will work in VMWare as well.
https://crazierl.org/ https://github.com/russor/crazierl/
There's a hosted v86 demo as well (works better on a desktop than a phone):
https://crazierl.org/demo.html
It's also in the weird OS section at https://copy.sh/v86/