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Run browser and/or mpv directly on hardware?
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this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2026
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This was indeed a very interesting talk. Not sure if the accusatory tone (Edit: Of the speaker!) was warranted but I'm not really the target audience so who am I to judge.
One aspect that he only mentioned in passing is that hardware manufacturers seem to be very happy to entertain Linux's (and Windows') assumptions about memory, just like they seem to be very happy to entertain assumptions about execution order. Nobody wants to make hardware that requires a weird bespoke operating system because of its bespoke microarchitecture (except perhaps for Apple, though I'm not confident they're really innovating in this regard). Maybe I lack perspective but I don't really see a nice way out of this either, since nobody wants to buy hardware that requires weird bespoke operating systems either (except once again Apple). And I don't see how an operating system could be widely supported across many different SoC designs without accumulating a similar complexity to modern Linux.
We should definitely be feeling mildly uncomfortable about this entire thing though.
Looks like I've replied to you a few times, and sorry for the accusatory tone! Didn't mean it! You did get me worried since I'm going to be used "bare metal" in my embedded class later this semester, and felt like I had gone insane not being able to find it anywhere. I was mostly just trying to convince myself this morning I wasn't insane. I had thought it was the standard terminology. I do also need to caveat this that I am not familiar with whatever law OOP was referencing. I'm assuming it was one of the either baked-in surveillance or age verification things. Yeah, I'm with you and don't really see a way out, unless we just step way back in time when we had less standardization and do bespoke everything. Cheers, and sorry for the tone!
Oh no I wasn't talking about your tone at all, sorry about my poor phrasing there. I meant the tone of Timothy Roscoe which rubbed me the wrong way.
I might be a bit overly sensitive since it reminded me of how science cranks like to talk about their "discoveries" - You know, how people like Avi Loeb or Eric Weinstein will go on Joe Rogan and complain how nobody in academia is taking them seriously. Obviously that's not at all what Roscoe is doing but it sounded a tiny bit like that to my ears, at least before the Q&A section (which I hadn't watched before writing my comment).
No you are actually correct, "bare metal" does in fact mean "without an OS". It just got co-opted to mean... other things additionally, and in the case of servers specifically the new usage ended up crowding out the original one. Hence the original misunderstanding.