Hardware Virtualization

https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/dalme/2024-08-19_gsoc_2024_hardware_virtualization_final_report/

by rcarmo • 2 years ago

186 35 2 years ago

halfcat• 2 years ago

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

bobajeff2• 2 years ago

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.

jonhohle2• 2 years ago

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_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?

mycall• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

As someone who's never used it, what is so great about BeOS? I mean concretely, not in figurative language like this.

caycep2• 2 years ago

if I recall, (and someone correct me if I'm wrong), it had deep multithreaded support/design, more so than any other desktop OS at the time, so it could run more simultaneous processes and apps w/o getting bogged down. at least I think there was a demo claiming this.

krylon2• 2 years ago

From what I heard, the filesystem was very cool. You could attach arbitrary key-value pairs to files, and e.g. rather than store song metadata in ID3 tags or whatever, it was stored as filesystem metadata, making it searchable by any program without knowledge of a file's internals. As I recall reading, one could create a virtual folder that contained the results of a search, e.g. "all MP3 files where artist='Pink Floyd'" and use that as a playlist.

I have played around a bit with Haiku, but have not figured out how to do that so far.

adastra225• 2 years ago

I used BeOS as my main driver for about a year and a half, back in the day.

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).

miles• 2 years ago

dr_dank summed it up back in 2003 [0]:

"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."

[0] https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66224&cid=6095472

rvz• 2 years ago

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.

tptacek• 2 years ago

This is a very common phenomenon, and it's especially apparent if you specialize in some area that is fashionable on HN. The right things to do are to upvote good hardcore technical specialist content, and to contribute comments in the same vein. Sometimes, with a really good story, there just isn't much to say anyways; there doesn't need to be.

nxobject• 2 years ago

It's interesting that this was built to support QEMU – a lot of Haiku's tentpole applications are ports at this point (e.g. Firefox, GNU toolchain, etc.)

yellowapple• 2 years ago

It'd be interesting to see this evolve into a reliable way to spin up a Linux or Windows VM with GPU passthrough. Since Haiku's GPU acceleration story is (last I checked) rather nonexistent, it seems like it'd be a good way to put an otherwise-unused GPU to use, so long as the GPU supports passthrough in the first place.

dgfitz• 2 years ago

I believe you can do this now if you’re willing to run the xen hypervisor. More arms and legs than a “normal” host/vm setup to be sure.

Hardware Virtualization

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