Hardware Virtualization
haiku-os.org
haiku-os.org
”On the other side of the road are two competitors that have come along more recently.
One of them (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the Euro-sedans, better designed, more technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as anything else on the market--and yet cheaper than the others.
With one exception, that is: Linux…”
I think BeOS had a restriction that they legally couldn't sell computers because of a situation with Apple similar to restriction that NeXT could only sell workstations.
After porting to x86 they had issues getting preinstalled on OEMs because of the OEMs contract with Microsoft which prevented the OEM from selling PCs with any other operating system. https://www.theregister.com/2002/02/20/be_inc_sues_microsoft...
I’ve never heard that they were restricted by Apple in any way (which may have been possible since Gasse and Sakoman left Apple to start Be). Do you have any reference?
Apple went with Jobs + NeXT instead.
So if you buy this and it goes in your spare bedroom because it's cool, maybe you run the demo to show a few friends, you've cost Be money and not helped them towards their goals.
What they want is a two man indie startup buys a BeBox and uses it to invent Zoom, or Blender, or at least Portal or something. Something that creates a significant demand from real users for Be's actual product, an operating system, and which is hard to replicate for the existing 1980s-style single CPU operating systems Be wants to compete with.
Ideally for JLG, this product attracts attention from Cupertino. If Be Inc. flops but Apple hire him back as new CEO, that's fine. If they buy Be Inc. and he gets to cash out and prove he was right too that's even better.
Did they sell the hardware at a loss?
> If you buy this and it goes in your spare bedroom because it's cool, maybe you run the demo to show a few friends, you've cost Be money and not helped them towards their goals.
If the hardware earns a small profit, and the enthusiast does not call the vendor for support, but creates blogs/video/media to generate user/developer/partner demand, that should be net positive for the vendor.
> What they want is a two man indie startup buys a BeBox and uses it to invent Zoom, or Blender, or at least Portal or something. Something that creates a significant demand from real users for Be's actual product, an operating system, and which is hard to replicate for the existing 1980s-style single CPU operating systems Be wants to compete with.
A variation of this text/sentiment should be included on the marketing page for every hardware "dev board", including Qualcomm SDXE dev device from ex-Apple team, that is attempting to compete with Apple Silicon and x86 PCs.
https://www.arrow.com/en/products/c8380-12c-mp-32g/thunderco...
In practice there's always going to be a certain element of post-hoc justification as to why this or that software really mattered and how it "couldn't" have existed for other platforms.
[1] https://chiselapp.com/user/ttcoder/repository/genode-haiku/i...
What's needed is Haiku on Linux, but no it would be too sensible..
BeOS was designed for SMP hardware, was preemptive and had good threading support, but besides that there is nothing really especial about it. "pervasive multithreading" simply consisted in using threads a lot (for 90's definition of "lot"). Creating and managing the threads by hand. In 90's C++.
Modern operating systems have caught with that and gone beyond of what beos did.
But yeah, it's something we take for granted today.
I have played around a bit with Haiku, but have not figured out how to do that so far.
One thing that we take for granted now was it supported low-latency concurrency, so its user interface felt really, REALLY snappy. You could launch 4-5 different videos, in different windows all playing at once, and there was absolutely no jitter and lag. Unless you grew up with the user interfaces of the mid-90's (Windows 3.1/95, MacOS 7.6), you won't appreciate just how mind-boggling this was.
The other big feature that unfortunately hasn't been broadly adopted by other operating systems was the file system. I know this one pretty well because I actually wrote my own driver for it (as a high school's hobby project mind you, so probably extremely cringe if I saw the source code again). BeOS didn't have a hierarchical file system so much as a relational database with built-in support for showing nested relationships as folders, and support for multi-megabyte blob types for the actual file data. Emails, for example, were stored with each header value as a separate column in the email table. If you opened your folder of emails, you could sort by sender, time received, subject, etc. just from the finder window. Within the BeOS API, you could write complex joins on the filesystem, e.g. between your emails and your contact list (which was also stored as metadata IIRC).
"BeOS was demonstrated to me during my senior year of college. The guy giving the talk played upwards of two dozen mp3s, a dozen or so movie trailers, the GL teapot thing, etc. simultanously. None of the apps skipped a beat. Then, he pulled out the showstopper.
"He yanked the plug on the box.
"Within 20 seconds or so of restarting, the machine was chugging away with all of its media files in the place they were when they were halted, as if nothing had happened.
"Damn."
I guess that the lack of comments around this project indicates the extreme technical detail of low level operating system code which is over the heads of >90% of HN readers which I want to see such posts like this here rather than yet another copy-and-paste LLM project.
This report is nicely presented and offers a neat explanation into what was done around hardware-assisted virtualization with the goal of using the NetBSD NVVM driver in another OS to support this in QEMU.
Great job to them.