[HN Gopher] Hardware Virtualization
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Hardware Virtualization
Author : rcarmo
Score : 100 points
Date : 2024-08-22 08:33 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.haiku-os.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.haiku-os.org)
| halfcat wrote:
| BeOS lives on. Relevant quote from Neil Stephenson's _In the
| Beginning was the Command Line_ [1], a fun commentary on early
| Mac, Windows, Linux, and BeOS competition.
|
| _"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..."_
|
| [1] https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt
| bobajeff wrote:
| Yeah, it didn't matter that it was cheap because you still had
| to install it and most people even today don't modify the OS
| their PC comes with.
|
| 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.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Be sold computers - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox
|
| 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_mi
| crosoft...
|
| 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?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I have some vague shadows of memories relating to PPC BeOS.
| jonhohle wrote:
| How sweet the late 90s would have been with BeOS on a
| fast PPC!
| hypercube33 wrote:
| Didn't they sell a dual socket PPC BeBox?
| greendave wrote:
| Dual 66MHZ 603 CPUs at first, and later dual 133MHZ 603e
| CPUs. For the time interesting, but hardly head and
| shoulders above the 200MHZ Pentium Pros of the same era.
| bobajeff wrote:
| No. I don't have any sources just vaguely remember reading
| (or watching?) something that mentioned that. I think it
| was like a non-compete agreement or something. It could all
| be just my imagination though.
| tialaramex wrote:
| The thing to know about the BeBox is that it's a cost
| centre. Every single Be fan who purchased a BeBox to
| "support the cause" drained limited cash and support from
| Be Inc. The idea is twofold, this demonstrates _what_ to
| build, if you 're making a new workstation you shouldn't
| care about what works well in Windows (not this) because
| SMP is the future, and this demonstrates _how_ it 's used,
| with the breakthrough applications that do not exist in
| 1995 on software like Windows 3.x or (Classic) MacOS.
|
| 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.
| mycall wrote:
| For those who do like to modify their OS and appreciate the
| beauty of BeOS, there is a merge of Haiku with Genode [1]. It
| is pretty active and has much promise.
|
| [1] https://chiselapp.com/user/ttcoder/repository/genode-
| haiku/i...
| umanwizard wrote:
| As someone who's never used it, what is so great about BeOS? I
| mean concretely, not in figurative language like this.
| rvz wrote:
| Why is it that this post is on the front page with no comments
| about the actual contents of the post and yet the first comment
| is about "the old BeOS days" again?
|
| 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.
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(page generated 2024-08-22 17:00 UTC)