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Out of general curiosity, why doesn't a OS like this focus on being a VM-only OS? If they went this route, they wouldn't need to worry about driver hell, right?
by bprater 18y ago
Out of general curiosity, why doesn't a OS like this focus on being a VM-only OS? If they went this route, they wouldn't need to worry about driver hell, right?
And god knows I'm not going to give up my core OS anytime soon for a toy OS. But I'd love to play with it inside my VM!
Seems like an easy decision. What am I overlooking?
- halo 18y agoBecause its developers want to use it as an every-day operating system without the overhead of another. They don't see it as a "toy OS" but rather something actually useful that they want to use on a day-to-day basis. It's worth adding they already provide drivers for at least VMWare and possibly other virtual machines as well as VMWare images so it's not as though they're treating virtual machines as second-class citizens.
- derefr 18y agoCouldn't there be created a hypervisor OS that translated diverse drivers to a single, unified API, and did nothing else (basically running the VM, in kernel space, without scheduling.) I could see Linux stripped down to perform this task--having all computers appear to all operating systems as the exact same hardware might push some distinct advantages along with it. For example, a network is a network is a network; it would be the hypervisor worrying about if it was a wi-fi one or a cell modem or whatever, and then providing a clean API for any additional features one might have over the other (connecting to APs for wifi.) Actually, picturing this further, it would be perfect if the hypervisor exported all its APIs over 9P. Any extra features would be immediately discoverable.
- zandorg 18y agoI once suggested a virtual MIDI interface in WinUAE (the Amiga emulator), after having implemented one in a C64 emulator (Vice). This was mainly for Bars & Pipes (by Todor Fay, who worked on DirectX). They did it, too!
- burke 18y ago"...if the hypervisor exported all its APIs over 9P." Please sign me up for your newsletter. I need to find more excuses to use 9P. Wmii got me hooked.
- daemin 18y agoWhile this is an interesting idea, and definitely possible, I'm left wondering if it would be desired. By that I mean do we want all networks to behave in the same way, do we want all devices to be represented by their lowest common denominator? Essentially creating this specific hypervisor OS would create a lot of places for leaky abstractions, and you'd end up creating a lot more special case code to detect and fix those abstractions then you would if you just coded the drivers.
- cturner 18y agoAs a general thing for toy OSs it's a good idea, but a big part of the sell of BeOS was high performance media and filesystem, and the benefits of these would be reduced as a VM OS.