LingVM is an Erlang VM that runs directly on Xen

medium.com

51 points·byaruhaf··7 comments

Code running as a VM in the Xen hypervisor is not really the traditional sense of "Bare Metal".

Yep. Fortunately, you can also build a RumpRun Kernel using Erlang as of a few months ago. I haven't tried it yet, but it sounds like it could provide true bare metal.

Not meant as criticism, but a (maybe fruitless) theoretical discusson:

Even with RumpRun on true bare metal, should that be called "Bare Metal Erlang"? It's not like the erlang code manages the raw memory, contains a driver for the hard disk controller etc.

Clearly there are fewer layers between the erlang code and the bare metal compared to a traditional OS, but still plenty and they do quite a lot of work.

I agree, bare metal != a bare vm or some other abstraction layer, bare metal indicates you talk directly to the hardware.

Feel free to write drivers in Erlang for every disk controller and network card that are available.

Well that is probably never going to happen. And that's totally fine with me, there is not mutch to gain from that anyway. Unikernels running on hypervisors is a very cool thing, but I wouldn't call it "bare metal".

Very interesting - might be a great way to setup a sandbox for untrusted code.

On a related note: there is also the nerves project for embedded Erlang/Elixir - http://nerves-project.org/

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