Hacker News Reader

Comment by slurry | Hacker News Reader

Not very different, since we're basically doing microkernel-y things anyway using various kinds of virtualization.

It would probably be more elegant to just run Hurd or whatever instead of for example running multiple JVMs on top of multiple Linux instances on top of a hypervisor (yes, this happens), but them's the breaks.

View on HN

Well, people are still working on the problem. You can run some runtimes directly on Xen, like the JVM and Haskell.

http://labs.oracle.com/projects/dashboard.php?id=185

http://readwrite.com/2010/11/30/haskell-virtual-machine

Is this comparable to eLua?

http://www.eluaproject.net/home/overview

EDIT: I found this on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_aXsutL4rQ

I was interested in this a while back, but never took the plunge. Seems you can run it in an 'emulator' on i386.

Well, kind of but not really. Xen isn't really bare metal in any sense of the phrase. It's just at a similar (but different) level of abstraction. In an embedded system you will need to have device drivers, respond to hardware interrupts, etc. On Xen you make hypercalls.

So eLua and these projects are similar in, say, the same way that a typical RTOS is similar to running Linux on AWS. They both have kernels, but the environments are vastly different.

Thanks for the explanation. I was really hoping to find something like the SqueakNOS project

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=239339

ROS calls itself a 'meta-operating system', I guess the definition of an OS is sort of blurry!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com