This is as bare-metal as it gets since it's not running on a VM.
How much of linux isn't about cgroups and namespaces? Docker I believe needs about a 100 system calls to get containers to work. How much of the tree could you shake and still have containers work? Would you still call the host Linux, or something else? And what would that system do for Windows and OS X users? Anything?
Could you maintain this 'something else' as a permanent fork, a la Red Hat?
"A bare-metal server is a computer server that hosts one tenant, or consumer, only.[1] The term is used for distinguishing between servers that can host multiple tenants and which utilize virtualisation and cloud hosting.[2] Such servers are used by a single consumer and are not shared between consumers. Each server may run any amount of work for a user, or have multiple simultaneous users, but they are dedicated entirely to the entity who is renting them. Unlike servers in a data centre, they are not being shared between multiple customers.
Bare-metal servers are physical servers. Each server offered for rental is a distinct physical piece of hardware that is a functional server on its own. They are not virtual servers running in multiple pieces of shared hardware."
> In computer science, bare machine (or bare metal) refers to a computer executing instructions directly on logic hardware without an intervening operating system.
Bare-metal server has indeed been used to refer to non-virtualized servers, but it's a misnomer. The current terminology for this is "dedicated server".
Today when most tech people talk about bare metal they refer to a server that is not virtual.
If you disagree with what's on the page, please add or edit the information there. With proper references, it will be appreciated by everyone that uses Wikipedia.
But you still can't stop language from changing no matter how "right" you are you.
Not many things are written to do that, of course. Oracle used to offer an installation mode like this. It was generally a gimmick - you pay for a tiny bit of performance with a ton of flexibility. There are probably use cases where it makes sense, but not that many.
This usage has been, in my experience, a lot more widespread.
Oracle, and BEA before them, used to offer a JVM which ran on top of a thin custom OS designed only to host the JVM, you could call it a "unikernel". Product was called JRockit Virtual Edition (JRVE), WebLogic Server Virtual Edition (WLS-VE, when used to run WebLogic), earlier BEA called it LiquidVM. The internal name for that thin custom OS was in fact "Bare Metal". Similar in concept to https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv but completely different implementation
I think one thing which caused a problem for it, is a lot of customers want to deploy various management tools to their VMs (security auditing software, performance monitoring software, etc) and when your VM runs a custom OS that becomes very difficult or impossible. So adopting this product could lead to the pain of having to ask for exceptions to policies requiring those tools and then defending the decision to adopt it against those who use those policies to argue against it. I think this is part of why the product was discontinued.
Nowadays, Oracle offers "bare metal servers" [1] – which are just hypervisor-less servers, same as other cloud vendors do. Or similarly, "Oracle Database Appliance Bare Metal System" [2] – which just means not installing a hypervisor on your Oracle Database Appliance.
So Oracle seems to have a history of using the phrase "bare metal" in both the senses being discussed here.
[1] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/compute/bare-metal.html
[2] https://docs.oracle.com/en/engineered-systems/oracle-databas...
I will say, this comment section is the first time I'm hearing about "bare-metal" meaning "without an OS", but the above question is genuine curiosity.
I've never before encountered, "Includes a full feature-rich OS" as "bare-metal" before. Reading the title I assumed someone managed to get some flavor of Kubernetes running right on the hardware as the lowest-level software layer of the system. That would have meant bare-metal to me. What's described here is running Kubernetes on a physical host rather than a virtual host from what I can tell, but it's not running Kubernetes "bare-metal" because between Kubernetes and the "metal" is Linux.
Or at least that's what it would mean in my world, but the interpretation appears to be different for others. Outside of confusion, I was also just disappointed. This article is just basically setting up Kubernetes. That it's on a physical host is a lot less interesting and novel to me than if they'd managed to implement some shape of Kubernetes as the OS itself, which is what I'd originally interpreted the title to mean.
> In computer science, bare machine (or bare metal) refers to a computer executing instructions directly on logic hardware without an intervening operating system.
Bare-metal = no VMs or other virtualization involved.
I imagine it also has some meaning for the music community.
https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a219356.pdf (search for bare-metal)
I suspect it comes from the automotive paint industry. Sanding down to the "bare metal" for the best finish...where the primer and paint are as close to the substrate as they can be.