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Comment by tomcam | Hacker News Reader

Very neat project! It appears to run on qemu. Can someone tell me at the 30,000' view what's required to get it running on actual hardware? I'm imagining something like signed boot manager, hard disk drivers, etc. They seem to have a ton of USB stuff working which seems amazing to me, but I've been out of the low-level PC loop for a couple decades and don't know what prevents working on bare metal in 2024.

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I've got a hobby OS that runs on real hardware (sometimes, on some hardware). Mostly it's just patience and debugging effort to get things going. qemu defaults to doing some things quickly instead of accurately, so it's easy to do things wrong as an OS and if you don't test regularly, you can end up with a lot of breakage.

I don't have a boot manager, my OS is multiboot compatible, so I can boot with qemu's multiboot support or PXElinux, or grub or whatever. IMHO, with the multiboot standard, there's no need to write a boot loader if you want to build an OS, and no need to write an OS if you want to build a boot loader.

Looks like this OS has a good selection of storage drivers, so should be good to go there.

At 30,000' I'm not seeing anything that would prevent this from booting on hardware. It seems to have a reasonable complement of modern, real-world drivers. On the other hand, physical hardware tends to have bugs, quirks and diversity that VMs don't have, so hobby operating systems may have trouble with it if they aren't tested on it.

I have managarm installed on a partition on my testing ThinkPad. The steps needed to get it set up were creating the partition, copying over the sysroot, and adding an entry to my grub configuration.

Awesome. How is the overall experience?

Theoretically, since it has a few real world drivers, it may be possible to run on real world hardware, but in practice, Managarm tends to get hung up very low level, at Eir or Thor (the two components of the microkernel). Since basically all the testing is currently done on QEMU, real world testing isn't really a thing for Managarm

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