On 18/05/2020 08:02, Malcolm McLean wrote:
On Sunday, 17 May 2020 13:41:30 UTC+1, Paul Edwards wrote:
On Wednesday, 13 May 2020 20:02:09 UTC+10, Malcolm McLean wrote:
I'm reviving this. I think yur niche might be virtual machines.
A virtual machine needs to be able to run with constrained resources
and an OS that keeps out of the way. We know it is possible to do
serious work with only a few MB of RAM and and few tens of MB hard drive >>> space, because for many years PCs had that specification.
That's nothing for a modern PC. A virutal machine could be a faitly
lightweight application in the host environment.
Can you elaborate on this please? Which OS
needs to keep out of the way? Would that be
PDOS/386? Which currently allows applications
to directly manipulate I/O ports.
Virtual machines are usually hosted on a fully-featured, modern OS like Windows or Apple;s OSX, running on a desktop machine with several
gigabytes of memory and several hundred gigabytes of backing store.
The virtual machine itself is just an ordinary application, running
under the host OS.
One class of VM meets that description but not all.
However there's a real need for virtual machines to be light on resources.
The need is already met. Solaris derived platforms have has lightweight
zones since the early 2000s. Linux now has containers.
Their memory and disk space is memory and disk space that cannot be used
by the host machine. So the OS on the virtual machine needs to keep out of the way. It can't be hogging huge tracts of memory or hard disk space.
Zones and containers share resources with the host OS.
However, whilst Linux is
acceptable for virtual machines, a typical Linux installation is
still rather greedy.
BusyBox
--
Ian.
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