Deprecation of erl_boot_server

[Peer Stritzinger]

Hi Lukas,

not doing anything with it yet but recently re-discovered it and made a point to explore possibilities for our GRiSP and other embedded use-cases.

In the context of GRiSP it would be interesting for nodes with RAM but no disk (eMMC or SD-card) and only minimal flash for a boot system.  In this case we could either put the GRiSP (Erlang+Unikernel) image runnable into flash or just having a bootloader that can pull this image and start it into RAM.  For these scenarios it would be cool if the prim loader could get its beam files from somewhere else.

Of course there are workarounds when that is no longe possible but I always saw it as a feature that ERTS can be self sufficient here.

General improvements for distributed deployment will be used here.  And I don’t mean the usual Kubernetes setup but more focussed on heterogenous IoT and edge computing.  And for this case the boot server can be a useful starting point.

Any thoughts what to replace it with for these use cases?

Best regards,
-- Peer 


> On 10. Dec 2020, at 14:24, Lukas Larsson <lukas@REDACTED> wrote:
> 
> Hello!
> 
> We are thinking about deprecating and then removing the erl_boot_server (https://erlang.org/doc/man/erl_boot_server.html <https://erlang.org/doc/man/erl_boot_server.html>) and corresponding support in erl_prim_loader. erl_boot_server is used to boot systems that do not have a disk to read Erlang modules from but instead do it via tcp.
> 
> So we would like to know if anyone is using this functionality? and if so, what is the problem that you are solving with it?
> 
> Lukas

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