From: Michal Suchanek <hramrach@...>
Date: 2009-06-08T23:27:50+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby OS

2009/6/8 Sparky Mat <max@sparkymat.net>:
> Kyle Schmitt wrote:
>
>> Umm, have you thought perhaps of using an existing kernel and just
>> having one binary, that being ruby?  You could then build your whole
>> userspace on top of that.
>>
>
> I suspect that this would be the most practical approach, and probably,
> after failing the bare-metal thing, I would end up doing this. However,
> I'd still like to give the bare-metal port a try.

What would you want the bare-metal port to do? If you just want to run
in-memory without using any hardware devices like disk drives,
graphics, etc it would be fairly simple.

However, there's a reason why Linux and BSDs have bazzilions of
drivers that took years to develop and debug and half of them are
still failing half of the time. There's simply way too much different
hardware which is either not documented or has undocumented bugs so
you will have hard time if you try to run on bare metal and support
any hardware but the main memory.

Exotic microkernels won't help you either because they suffer from the
same basic problem: they don't have drivers for most hardware so the
chance you can boot anything based on them on your machine is pretty
small.

The bare-metal approach is only viable for specialized applications
where you select and buy a well documented piece of hardware and port
the system to that.

Thanks

Michal