[Info-vax] Baremetal emulators, was: Re: Alpha emulator for OSX

[Chris Scheers]

Stephen Hoffman wrote:

> As for the more general issues. there's also that somebody — AVT most 
> likely, for this case — now has to maintain that Linux stack underneath 
> the emulation.   With the more traditional definition of "bare metal", 
> the only product patches that are necessary are specific to emulator 
> issues.   With the AVT distros, you're still going to need Linux network 
> stack and IP stack and kernel patches, probably also patches related to 
> TLS (as the network connections are or should be encrypted) and maybe 
> certificate updates, and those patches associated with any of the active 
> management or logging services or other ports that might be open within 
> the Linux portion of the stack.

It's not necessary for a "near bare metal" OS beneath an emulation to 
even have a stack to maintain.  There are many advantages to not having one.

Done correctly, the underlying OS is just used as a hardware abstraction 
layer.  It does not need a network stack.  It just needs a way, e.g., 
PCAP, to allow the emulation access to the network card.  Then all 
packets on the wire actually go to/from the emulation and never touch 
the underlying OS.

Where the underlying OS is never exposed to the external world, I don't 
see a big need for updates.

Of course, you do need to ensure that the underlying OS is indeed not 
exposed.

-- 
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Chris Scheers, Applied Synergy, Inc.

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