[erlang-questions] Erlang on custom OS

Chris Pacejo colanderman@REDACTED
Wed Aug 27 21:55:03 CEST 2014


On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 3:39 PM, Samuel Barney <samjbarney@REDACTED> wrote:
> I've had an idea churning in the back of my head for a while: Write a custom
> threadless operating system which uses erlang for pretty much everything.
> I've written a couple of custom kernels before, but this would be my first
> time porting a major project to one. Anyone have any experience porting
> Erlang to different platforms or an idea of where in the erlang source code
> I should start looking to see what the MINIMAL requirements to compile
> erlang are?

These people have Erlang running directly on the Xen hypervisor:
http://erlangonxen.org/

I've been working on my own non-serious-very-much-a-toy project to
build an OS in Erlang, running on Linux.  (i.e. Erlang is the only
non-system process running; everything the user sees goes through the
Erlang VM.)  I only mention it because you might find the same general
approach suitable: keep Linux around, just to provide the services
Erlang needs (including those you haven't implemented yet; e.g. native
TCP).  Linux can be VERY efficient when it's running primarily a
single process, so you're not really losing performance that way.



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