[jitl]

On the other hand, running on real hardware is less important if none of your hardware is real!

98% of Linux I interact with is running virtualized: on my desktop/laptop systems it’s either Virtualbox full-screened so I can use Windows for drivers, or a headless VM managed by Docker.app on my Mac. All my employer’s production workloads are AWS virtual machines.

My only Linux bare metal hardware is a home server, which I’m planning to retire soon-ish, replaced by a VM on an ebay Mac mini to reduce power bill & fan noise.

If someone can make a Linux compatible kernel that’s more secure and just as performant, it’s much easier these days to imagine a large new user base adopting it despite a dearth of drivers.

[weinzierl]

In computer science we are taught it's turtles all the way down but in the real world you learn that you hit the world of bits and bytes really fast.[1]

My point is that every virtualized environment needs a layer that talks to real hardware down below. We have enough diversity in the upper layers but not enough in the lowest layer.

[1] I heard it expressed like this from an Azul Systems employee first, but unfortunately don't remember who it was.

[jpc0]

Your os might be virtualised but very often the actual hardware leaks through that virtualisation, often intentionally.

I don’t see any support for an os that doesn’t have good driver support for accelerators, whether GPU/TPU or otherwise. And if your look into some of the accelerators built into modern amd and intel chips that becomes a nightmare just supporting the CPU, never mind USB host controllers and network interfaces etc