> You don't really need any OS to run, say, BEAM VM (just an example).
Yes, you do. BEAM will not handle your CPU interrupts or manage your physical memory pages or your USB devices. (The 99 percent of an OS's job.)
Yes, you do. BEAM will not handle your CPU interrupts or manage your physical memory pages or your USB devices. (The 99 percent of an OS's job.)
I'm sort of oversimplifying it (and probably forgetting a piece or two), but all that's needed is MMU, some minimal network subsystem with device drivers for network cards, and some very tiny VFS - just enough to handle the initrd-like thingy (the rest would be networked storage handled at the application level). E.g. if all we're going to ever run is a single VM that has its own ideas of processes and signals, we may not really need any full-fledged process scheduling or IPC, just the bits to support kernel's own threads.