MotorOS: a Rust-first operating system for x64 VMs

Re:MotorOS: a Rust-first operating system for x64 VMs by Veserv on Monday January 08, 2024 @01:59AM (#38909001)

In general, lots of hardware requires long waits to initialize. As in, program a value then you must wait 50 ms before querying the registers or the hardware will give you non-deterministic garbage with no error indication.

So, it depends on the hardware, though you are unlikely to need more than 1 second on anything other than truly degenerate hardware assuming you are initializing devices in parallel.

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Re:MotorOS: a Rust-first operating system for x64 VMs by azinman2 on Monday January 08, 2024 @02:27AM (#38909121)

But it’s only for VMs. So what hardware are you initializing?

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Re:MotorOS: a Rust-first operating system for x64 VMs by Modified3019 on Monday January 08, 2024 @04:21AM (#38909769)

I pass through a GPU and USB hub to a VM running on a machine in the garage. An optical video cable and network compatible USB extender brings the interface to a different room making it my primary “desktop” computer (and an outdated laptop as a backup device). Doesn’t get more silent and cool than this. Another VM on the garage machine gets a bunch of hard drives passed through to it.

That said, hardware passthrough/VFIO is likely out of the current realistic scope for this project. VM boot times can be optimized if you never look for hardware to initialize in the first place. Though they are still likely initializing a network interface of some sort.

“MicroVM” seems to be a term used when as much as possible is stripped from a VM, such as with https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker

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