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Setup & Installation / Re: Well ArcaOS 5.0 is probably the last version for me.
« on: June 01, 2021, 08:06:37 am »
On the thought of "64-bit OS/2", mostly what we really want is utilize all of our physical RAM in a system to be able to run more applications. We don't particularly care about the virtual address space limit per process as much, although that could be a bit of a pain point for web browsers in the future.
The "easy way" of doing this (if there is such a thing) to me seems like if you could wedge a hypervisor under OS/2 (or inside of it as the case my be) so you could run multiple instances of it, as if it were on KVM of ESXi but have it be totally transparent (or mostly transparently) to the user so it is all managed by native ArcaOS / OS/2 tooling in the UI and it appears like you are running one OS (think of the way virtual DOS machines currently work in OS/2). And have some sort of driver infrastructure added in to the kernel such that IPC mechanisms from the different running instances could be bridged together so from an application perspective it seems like applications are running on the same instance, and inter process communication works as normal. Granted this may well be a difficult project. I can see proof of concepting it as running multiple instances of ArcaOS in VirtualBox on a Windows system with drivers added so IPC works between applications in the different instances.
I'm only vaguely aware of how process address space works in OS/2, most of my OS internals knowledge is from FreeBSD so I might be way off base in how practical this would be to do, but it does seem doable. The main goal here would be to do the minimum possible change required to the system itself and push all the complexity down to some lower layer. Xen or Bhyve or L4 could perhaps be repurposed to minimize the effort.
I know I'm far from the first person to come up with this idea, but I'm wondering if anyone has tried pursuing it.
The "easy way" of doing this (if there is such a thing) to me seems like if you could wedge a hypervisor under OS/2 (or inside of it as the case my be) so you could run multiple instances of it, as if it were on KVM of ESXi but have it be totally transparent (or mostly transparently) to the user so it is all managed by native ArcaOS / OS/2 tooling in the UI and it appears like you are running one OS (think of the way virtual DOS machines currently work in OS/2). And have some sort of driver infrastructure added in to the kernel such that IPC mechanisms from the different running instances could be bridged together so from an application perspective it seems like applications are running on the same instance, and inter process communication works as normal. Granted this may well be a difficult project. I can see proof of concepting it as running multiple instances of ArcaOS in VirtualBox on a Windows system with drivers added so IPC works between applications in the different instances.
I'm only vaguely aware of how process address space works in OS/2, most of my OS internals knowledge is from FreeBSD so I might be way off base in how practical this would be to do, but it does seem doable. The main goal here would be to do the minimum possible change required to the system itself and push all the complexity down to some lower layer. Xen or Bhyve or L4 could perhaps be repurposed to minimize the effort.
I know I'm far from the first person to come up with this idea, but I'm wondering if anyone has tried pursuing it.