Comment by haspok | Hacker News Reader

Comment by haspok | Hacker News Reader

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As far as I can tell, there are no drivers - this OS runs on QEMU only. I guess if you are lucky, you can get it to boot on a real system accidentally.

This is the opposite of Haiku-OS, for example, which tries to provide at least the minimal amount of drivers, and some people are using it on real hardware.

It was actually a really interesting decision, to concentrate all efforts on the fun parts of OS development, and completely ignore the 80% which is boring, frustrating, and requires a large continuous investment to stay up to date with the latest stuff. Looking at Haiku, they have been working on their OS for decades now, and still aren't in a generally usable form.

I'm not sure what a QEMU-only OS is actually good for, other than playing around with it, but maybe I'm not the target audience :)

I don't see a problem with a QEMU-only OS. Serenity is explicity designed for personal use. It's not a headless OS in any way. I could see it being useful in a corporate environment where it's useful to have a windows host for business reasons, and you run your unix-like system in a hypervisor for development. That's how I work, and I think quite a few people work like this. Serenity is perfect for this.

And obviously, nothing prevents people from writing drivers eventually. Andreas probably wants to run Serenity on whatever his hardware is eventually. But there's little point in doing that till we actually have a mature system that anyone would want to run daily.

It is good enough to run on top of type 1 hypervisors like Hyper-V and Xen, like all those systems powering all cloud flavours out there.

There are additional crazy folk working on bare metal support.

I’m waiting for someone to start working on a custom cpu for it at this point :)

Haiku is actually quite usable on a wide variety of hardware (I use it myself on bare metal), it only needs a browser port such as Firefox. Falkon has been ported as of yesterday, but still might need fixes and stuff.

In case the the graphics drivers are not supported, VESA and/or Framebuffer drivers come to aid, and provide a usable system.

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