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VMware and Microsoft ship Linux images built for VMs https://github.com/vmware/photon https://github.com/vmware/photon https://github.com/microsoft/cbl-marine

VMware and Microsoft ship Linux images built for VMs https://github.com/vmware/photon https://github.com/vmware/photon https://github.com/microsoft/cbl-mariner https://github.com/microsoft/cbl-mariner

oarsinsync 3y ago
Ish. Photon is optimised for virtualisation, but it also runs on bare metal. (I don’t know anything about CBL Mariner). The article is talking about stripping down to the bare minimum, down to the level of even removing filesystem drivers, because they’re not necessarily needed!
- gorkish 3y ago
  I was thinking about this yesterday; other than POSIX why do operating systems choose a filesystem heirarchy as the thing that they provide as a datastore? Why not a structured document store, a blob store, a key value store, or some mixture of all of this? I'm very bitter that computing went into turtle stacking mode and took its 50 years of baggage with it.
  - WantonQuantum 3y ago
    Microsoft tried this with Windows Future Storage: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS OS/400 is quite different too: https://www.quora.com/On-the-AS-400-how-are-objects-stored-on-a-disk-compared-to-a-traditional-filesystem-like-FAT32-or-ext4-Whats-the-underlying-filesystem-like https://www.quora.com/On-the-AS-400-how-are-objects-stored-o... The BeOS filesystem has many DB like features: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_File_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_File_System
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    Two separate things: - I don't think that the suggestion was to remove the filesystem outright, just that if you run everything over NFS or 9P then you don't need drivers for ext/xfs/fat/... - To the broader "why do we even use filesystems" - because those other options are less powerful while offering marginal benefit. Also because backwards-compatibility and interoperability with other systems is useful.
  - lproven 3y ago
    There have been several. IBM i is one, formerly known as OS/400. The Pick OS is another. Here's a modern one, DBOS: https://dbos-project.github.io/ https://dbos-project.github.io/
- p_l 3y ago
  CBL (not sure about Mariner specifically) had builds targeting hardware, AFAIK. I recall ~2016 that Azure was running their own Linux images on various parts of the gear, like "Smart NICs" in VM hosts that cooperated with SDN driver in Hyper-V.
lproven 3y ago
[Article author here] Not the same at all. These are not really cut down in any important way and are full fat complete standalone OSes. That people think it's a good idea to run full bare-metal OSes in VMs is the reason why I wrote the article.

oarsinsync 3y ago

Ish. Photon is optimised for virtualisation, but it also runs on bare metal. (I don’t know anything about CBL Mariner). The article is talking about stripping down to the bare minimum, down to the level of even removing filesystem drivers, because they’re not necessarily needed!

gorkish 3y ago
I was thinking about this yesterday; other than POSIX why do operating systems choose a filesystem heirarchy as the thing that they provide as a datastore? Why not a structured document store, a blob store, a key value store, or some mixture of all of this? I'm very bitter that computing went into turtle stacking mode and took its 50 years of baggage with it.
- WantonQuantum 3y ago
  Microsoft tried this with Windows Future Storage: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS OS/400 is quite different too: https://www.quora.com/On-the-AS-400-how-are-objects-stored-on-a-disk-compared-to-a-traditional-filesystem-like-FAT32-or-ext4-Whats-the-underlying-filesystem-like https://www.quora.com/On-the-AS-400-how-are-objects-stored-o... The BeOS filesystem has many DB like features: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_File_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_File_System
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  Two separate things: - I don't think that the suggestion was to remove the filesystem outright, just that if you run everything over NFS or 9P then you don't need drivers for ext/xfs/fat/... - To the broader "why do we even use filesystems" - because those other options are less powerful while offering marginal benefit. Also because backwards-compatibility and interoperability with other systems is useful.
- lproven 3y ago
  There have been several. IBM i is one, formerly known as OS/400. The Pick OS is another. Here's a modern one, DBOS: https://dbos-project.github.io/ https://dbos-project.github.io/
p_l 3y ago
CBL (not sure about Mariner specifically) had builds targeting hardware, AFAIK. I recall ~2016 that Azure was running their own Linux images on various parts of the gear, like "Smart NICs" in VM hosts that cooperated with SDN driver in Hyper-V.

lproven 3y ago

[Article author here] Not the same at all. These are not really cut down in any important way and are full fat complete standalone OSes. That people think it's a good idea to run full bare-metal OSes in VMs is the reason why I wrote the article.