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What do you mean by "directly"? I'm not familiar with Nanos internals, but after skimming their FAQ[0] it seems that Nanos is kind of VM that can't run on bare

What do you mean by "directly"? I'm not familiar with Nanos internals, but after skimming their FAQ[0] it seems that Nanos is kind of VM that can't run on bare metal and still requires hypervisor (presumably Linux, unless your CTO plays a lot of golf with MS salespeople): Nanos is a single process operating system designed to run as a virtual machine and has no support to run on hardware. [0]: https://nanos.org/faq https://nanos.org/faq

exceptione 3y ago
It seems you are right. The OPS documentation mentions that you can deploy it on bare metal, but this is a recent comment [0] that contradicts that . right now we don't have any plans to support bare metal installs like this as that would imply a bunch of other mgmt related tooling that would not be present (eg: start/stop the server, configure networking, deploy a new one, access rights, etc.) it also breaks the assumptions we have that it is only being deployed as a vm which means having to support a ton of random hardware drivers, nanos is intended to always be ran on top of a hypervisor of some kind - whether it's public cloud or something under your own control (eg: proxmox/vsphere/etc.) It seems like they make some distinction between true bare metal and somewhat bare metal, which is highly confusing. ___ [0]: https://github.com/nanovms/ops/issues/1522 https://github.com/nanovms/ops/issues/1522
- sweetjuly 3y ago
  It's bare metal in the sense that it's self-bootstrapping but the "metal" it supports is only a paravirtualized system. This is what they mean when they say that they don't want to support tons of random hardware drivers: they've written support for KVM paravirt devices (which are nearly universally available on VMs), and that allows the kernel to run on most hosting providers.
  - RetroTechie 3y ago
    So (if I understand correctly): It minimizes the software stack (and with that: attack surface) that application sits on, inside a VM. It does not (nor is it expected to) help to minimize said application. And it does not minimize the software stack that runs the VM.
    - convolvatron 3y ago
      exactly. its an adpater that provides a short path between the applications expectations and what the VM provides.

exceptione 3y ago

It seems you are right. The OPS documentation mentions that you can deploy it on bare metal, but this is a recent comment [0] that contradicts that . right now we don't have any plans to support bare metal installs like this as that would imply a bunch of other mgmt related tooling that would not be present (eg: start/stop the server, configure networking, deploy a new one, access rights, etc.) it also breaks the assumptions we have that it is only being deployed as a vm which means having to support a ton of random hardware drivers, nanos is intended to always be ran on top of a hypervisor of some kind - whether it's public cloud or something under your own control (eg: proxmox/vsphere/etc.) It seems like they make some distinction between true bare metal and somewhat bare metal, which is highly confusing. ___ [0]: https://github.com/nanovms/ops/issues/1522 https://github.com/nanovms/ops/issues/1522

sweetjuly 3y ago
It's bare metal in the sense that it's self-bootstrapping but the "metal" it supports is only a paravirtualized system. This is what they mean when they say that they don't want to support tons of random hardware drivers: they've written support for KVM paravirt devices (which are nearly universally available on VMs), and that allows the kernel to run on most hosting providers.
- RetroTechie 3y ago
  So (if I understand correctly): It minimizes the software stack (and with that: attack surface) that application sits on, inside a VM. It does not (nor is it expected to) help to minimize said application. And it does not minimize the software stack that runs the VM.
  - convolvatron 3y ago
    exactly. its an adpater that provides a short path between the applications expectations and what the VM provides.