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That's hypervisor's (or some theoretical HAL's) job. While those can also be called an OS - I meant, there's no need for a full-fledged one, like Linux kernel.
by drdaeman 3y ago
That's hypervisor's (or some theoretical HAL's) job. While those can also be called an OS - I meant, there's no need for a full-fledged one, like Linux kernel.
- titannet 3y agoReading that I am confused: isn't hardware abstraction what the Linux kernel does? It only becomes a general purpose OS with all the distribution specific stuff.
- drdaeman 3y agoIt does, and it does a lot more than just working with hardware. I'm sort of oversimplifying it (and probably forgetting a piece or two), but all that's needed is MMU, some minimal network subsystem with device drivers for network cards, and some very tiny VFS - just enough to handle the initrd-like thingy (the rest would be networked storage handled at the application level). E.g. if all we're going to ever run is a single VM that has its own ideas of processes and signals, we may not really need any full-fledged process scheduling or IPC, just the bits to support kernel's own threads.
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoA "hypervisor (or some theoretical HAL)" is literally what an OS is.