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Foone🏳️‍⚧️

Someone really needs to develop a lightweight VM container that we can stuff software in. Like, you know how you can buy DOS games on steam, and it just gives you dosbox preconfigured to play the game?

That, but for all software on all OSes

19 June at 19:53 | Open on digipres.club
25 comments
Philippe Jadin

@foone something like... docker ?

19 June at 19:57 | Open on tchafia.be
PurpleJillybeans :PrideDisk:

@foone Some people have tried doing this with qemu. It kinda works.

19 June at 19:57 | Open on kind.social
Foone🏳️‍⚧️

The idea would be to have a standardized-as-much-as-possible VM interface, and then your OS can implement that. New OS just needs a new implementation.

The point is protection against compatibility problems: it should be possible to run a PC game from 1982 and a video editing program from 2005, in the same way and be sure that you'll still be able to run them in another 30 years.

19 June at 20:00 | Open on digipres.club
Digital Mark λ 📚 🕹 💾 🥃

@foone Well, we did have Java, and Flash. Both made the mistake of object loading from the network which made them instant virus loaders. WASM is New Safer Java but dumb because it's built in a web browser.

19 June at 20:06 | Open on appdot.net
✧✦✶✷Catherine✷✶✦✧

@mdhughes @foone wasm is not tied to web browsers and it's not even particularly convenient to use from javascript

19 June at 20:20 | Open on mastodon.social
lp0 on fire :unverified:

@mdhughes, I'm assuming that by “it's”, you mean “it is” rather than “it has”…

19 June at 20:25 | Open on social.linux.pizza
Michal Nemecek

@foone this... would be the holy grail of virtualization 😲

19 June at 20:07 | Open on bitbang.social
Smoljaguar
gabrielbezerra
Clifton Royston

@gabrielbezerra @foone

That's a solution for a different problem - letting you write games/other software now that can run on many machines in the future. (Also its capabilities and performance are strictly limited by design, which is totally legit.)

I think what Foone is dreaming of is more like a super-duper version of VMWare or other hypervisor, to let you run *existing* software targeted to any OS, under any other OS/hardware.

And hell yeah that would be a huge step forward.

19 June at 21:11 | Open on wandering.shop
All We Like Worms

@foone makes me think of the old Freedows project:

"OS that would be binary-compatible with multiple existing OSes including Windows. Based on the stanford "cache kernel" principle, it aims at providing application kernels that in turn provide functionality of Windows, Linux, MacOS or other systems, to unsuspecting applications written for these systems, all at the same time. "

Being able to containerize the VM and run on a sort of meta-kernel would be cool as hell.

tunes.org/wiki/freedows.html

@foone makes me think of the old Freedows project:

"OS that would be binary-compatible with multiple existing OSes including Windows. Based on the stanford "cache kernel" principle, it aims at providing application kernels that in turn provide functionality of Windows, Linux, MacOS or other systems, to unsuspecting applications written for these systems, all at the same time. "

19 June at 20:20 | Open on mastodon.social
Phoebe Zeitler

@foone This is basically just Java If It Didn't Suck.

The idea behind Java was pretty much exactly this. In practice it was too advanced for its time, and by the time it was "usable" it was unusable for that purpose because of the breaking changes it took to get it to "usable" rendering the old code unusable.

19 June at 21:25 | Open on mastodon.social
wired mia

@foone like, something similar to kata containers, but without so much heft? i think they can turn a small oci image into a vm image and run it in a lightweight vm runtime

19 June at 20:00 | Open on void.rehab
Yulian Kuncheff

@foone you can do that with docker. I know a lot of Game + Wine in docker setups. You could probably do similar with anything. For Windows you can use Windows docker containers for similar

19 June at 20:01 | Open on hachyderm.io
Fi, infosec-aspected

@foone

this is isomorphic with the concepts behind atomic linux, kinda, and a lil like Tails...seems it ought to be doable if a reasonable machine management interface were available so you don't need to be a weird systems entity to configure it

19 June at 20:03 | Open on infosec.exchange
Alexander The 1st

@foone #FirstThought: What OS/2 specific game are you trying to run on a newer OS?

19 June at 20:07 | Open on mstdn.ca
Take Me To The Reg Lion
Marly Puckett

@foone there are now <current Linux epoch time> standards for lightweight VM containers.

19 June at 20:08 | Open on hachyderm.io
PrivateGER :owo:

@foone@digipres.club sounds like unikernel

sure, its not quite what you want, but I think it gets the idea across
https://unikraft.org/

19 June at 20:08 | Open on plasmatrap.com
cibyr

@foone some kind of player for VM products? A VM-ware Player?

19 June at 20:12 | Open on omg.wtf.sh
Tobias
✧✦✶✷Catherine✷✶✦✧

@foone i'm not sure how useful this is outside of software as art

ime the biggest use case for "i want to run ancient software" is when you have ancient hardware, and virtualization famously does not work very well for that

19 June at 20:22 | Open on mastodon.social
✧✦✶✷Catherine✷✶✦✧

@foone mind you it's still super worth it to preserve art

but it's not useful for _all software_. regretfully.

19 June at 20:23 | Open on mastodon.social
johnaldis

@foone I encountered FlatHub last week because someone was saying how bad it was—but is that kind of thing what you’re talking about? (Note I know next to nothing about FlatHub, and I’m really asking to see if I understood the point of it in the first place.)

19 June at 21:16 | Open on mas.to
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