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> There's something weirdly unsatisfying about building a Raspberry Pi appliance that boots to Linux just to do a Thing, when it could just boot to the Thing.
by guenthert 3y ago
> There's something weirdly unsatisfying about building a Raspberry Pi appliance that boots to Linux just to do a Thing, when it could just boot to the Thing.
Well, I think here the distinction between Linux the kernel and Linux the OS (may RMS forgive me) is important. I agree that booting a Linux OS to run a single application seems overkill and adds little other than maintenance burden and boot time. The Linux kernel however, particularly when stripped to the minimum needed, boots fast (<1s is possible), shields from the complications of the hardware which aren't of interest and allows some portability (even the various PI models are quite different under the hood). I'd think attempting to replace the Linux kernel just adds burden for little or no gain.
- Cieric 3y agoIf you were to do it all from scratch I could agree, but there are projects to allow baremetal code to interact with the different hardware on the Pi (works on a bunch of different models.) https://github.com/rsta2/circle https://github.com/rsta2/circle
- guenthert 3y agoNow I don't want to stand in the way of progress, but while I admire the skill and endurance of the contributors, I fail to see the motivation (I only skimmed their readme) for this project. It looks to me one gets a subset of the features of the Linux kernel with a superset of its bugs. And for owners of a Banana Pi (or Orange Pi etc.) not even that.