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>"Although CMS was originally designed to run on bare metal, the version shipped as part of IBM CP/CMS was dedicated to running inside a VM. As a thought exper

>"Although CMS was originally designed to run on bare metal, the version shipped as part of IBM CP/CMS was dedicated to running inside a VM. As a thought experiment, now let's think about what a Linux system would look like if it was designed with this in mind. It will only ever be a guest, running under a parent OS. (To make life easier, we can restrict any specific edition to one individual host hypervisor.) A lot of issues ordinary distros face just… disappear. It doesn't need an installer, because a VM image is just a file. It doesn't need an initrd, because we know the host hardware in advance: it's virtual, so it's always identical. It doesn't need to boot from disk, because it won't have disks: it will never drive any real hardware, meaning no real disks of its own. That also means no disk filesystem is needed." It also wouldn't need most drivers -- and possibly might not need any drivers, depending on how things were configured! Anyway, an interesting set of ideas...

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
I wonder why regular distros even need installers. I mean yes, it's friendly to new users. Yes, some steps must be run that cannot be expressed as one-size-fits-all files in a tarball. But could a power user not untar a filesystem and run a script and be good to go? I know that's a de-facto installer - I just wish the tarball was easier to get at, I guess. Seems like a lot of data (deb packages) tied up inside code (one big 'install' function)
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  It depends how you want the "install" to go; Gentoo stage3 tarballs are exactly like that (and, unsurprisingly, the BSDs at least used to favor it). On the other hand, I'm personally quite fond of the method where you point the package manager at a root directory and it creates the system there by (more or less) just downloading and unpacking packages into that directory; off the top of my head, nixos defaults to this approach, Arch at least used to, yum/dnf distros were quite happy to do it with a little prodding, debian does it with debootstrap... Anyways. The point is that this is in some ways more flexible; rather than starting with a root tarball and then adding packages, you just... install packages (almost incidentally including core/base packages).
- metalspoon 3y ago
  That's almost how you install Arch, btw.
- antod 3y ago
  Yup, all doable. 15yrs ago, I'd build custom Xen PV images for Debian and Ubuntu VMs that would start off as running debootstrap into a chroot. It was basically just that a directory you'd customise files in and turn into a tarball.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago

I wonder why regular distros even need installers. I mean yes, it's friendly to new users. Yes, some steps must be run that cannot be expressed as one-size-fits-all files in a tarball. But could a power user not untar a filesystem and run a script and be good to go? I know that's a de-facto installer - I just wish the tarball was easier to get at, I guess. Seems like a lot of data (deb packages) tied up inside code (one big 'install' function)

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
It depends how you want the "install" to go; Gentoo stage3 tarballs are exactly like that (and, unsurprisingly, the BSDs at least used to favor it). On the other hand, I'm personally quite fond of the method where you point the package manager at a root directory and it creates the system there by (more or less) just downloading and unpacking packages into that directory; off the top of my head, nixos defaults to this approach, Arch at least used to, yum/dnf distros were quite happy to do it with a little prodding, debian does it with debootstrap... Anyways. The point is that this is in some ways more flexible; rather than starting with a root tarball and then adding packages, you just... install packages (almost incidentally including core/base packages).
metalspoon 3y ago
That's almost how you install Arch, btw.
antod 3y ago
Yup, all doable. 15yrs ago, I'd build custom Xen PV images for Debian and Ubuntu VMs that would start off as running debootstrap into a chroot. It was basically just that a directory you'd customise files in and turn into a tarball.