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by dioptre 4878 days ago
When Darren and I were looking at baremetal OS - we liked it because we could quantify what Xen and other kernels were missing - generic drivers - and we saw we could improve everything by making a system more specialized and what we wanted to use (think about what you actually put a commercial system on, there's not too much choice - especially for HPC). An example of this would be an athlete like a runner, and a shot-putter. Think of their body shapes - they are very different! Yet we all treat operating systems as if they are the same (for compatibility). Being more specialist is obviously not for everyone! Linux (or any other OS) is...

Regarding compatibility - my personal long term aspiration is to abstract the HW through LLVM which will eventually allow us to target Xen or other exokernel systems or run more close to the metal by running/developing a true erlang kernel through a mixed ERTS/BMOS (Baremetal OS) code-base.

As mentioned in earlier comments, erlang already has a pretty mean scheduler, and memory management system. Personally as an academic exercise - I'd like to see how this operates at a kernel level and in the future, I'll be spending more time on this. All other existing operating systems I personally believe are just getting in the way of best possible performance.

Finally erlangonxen which you mentioned above is not open source. That does not make sense to me, and it does not give me what I want... Doing this is a very selfish exercise, as it's what I want. Hopefully other people will want (and make sense of) this too, but atm I'm not fussed.

Cheers Andrew