Wasn't there an "OS kit" or something like that with drivers derived from Linux one's at some moment? Found this some years ago when I was searching doc. about OSes---I seem to remember this was when looking for Mach (!) documentation, so could be CMU.
yes, utah (also did mach work) made oskit: http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/oskit/
the purpose of which was to borrow some of the hard parts to make writing research OSes easier.
Thierry Laronde (Alceste) <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com> http://www.kergis.com/
Tim Newsham http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/