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Comment by kahlonel | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off topic, but I feel like calling an internet server running an OS "bare-metal" is a disgrace to what "bare-metal" originally and historically referred to, i.e. computer hardware without any OS. Maybe IaaS providers are running out of creative names that they are now polluting other techs' namespace?

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To me, bare metal has meant running on an OS that’s directly on the hardware, instead of a virtual machine. However, I can see your point about what it could mean (i.e. the software itself is compiled to directly run on the hardware with no OS), but I’m struggling to think of a time when anything worked like that. You have to go really, really far back in history to apply that definition to general purpose computing systems. I’m left thinking that it would only really apply to embedded systems and hardware controllers, and many of those now even have some kind of micro-os that runs on them.

Not virtualized doesn't mean bare metal. I think the term would make more sense to you if you worked through "Linux from Scratch." There are things between embedded and running a full Linux OS.

What would those things be? Maybe it's a continuum but concepts are not continuous. Surely there are various degrees of OS but if it's anything that manages the "bare" hardware it's something like an OS. Arguably you could also call Xen Dom0 an operating system.

The younger you are, the higher up you operate in the pile of layers that modern computing has become, with little to no understanding of what's beneath.

That's a little unfair. The article shows options to run on "real" bare-metal hardware, but the same tools will work on cloud instances as well.

While real hardware has metal, that's not what bare metal means.

From your profile I see that you are interested in embedded systems, so that probably explains why you are upset. After almost two decades of virtualization I think "bare metal" has become a common term for server computing without VM. I am old but had no problems understanding the term as it was meant. Meanings of words vary with context and change over time.

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