Crazierl: An Erlang Operating System That Runs Distributed Systems on Bare Metal
A developer has created Crazierl, an experimental operating system built around the BEAM virtual machine that can join Erlang distributed clusters directly from bare metal hardware, without needing a host operating system layer.
What Is Crazierl?
Crazierl is a hobby operating system based on the BEAM runtime (the same VM that powers Erlang and Elixir). It boots directly on x86 hardware and can participate in Erlang distributed computing without a Linux or other OS layer in between.
Features and Limitations
- 32-bit x86 only, BIOS boot
- Two NIC drivers: virtio-net and Realtek 8168
- SMP support (crashy with high core counts in QEMU)
- Can join Erlang dist clusters and run distributed Erlang applications
- Includes a built-in chat application (chat:start())
- Apache 2.0 licensed, source on GitHub
Browser Demo
A browser-based demo using v86 JavaScript x86 virtual machine is available. Users can share a link with a hashtag to connect multiple instances into a distributed cluster directly in the browser.
Significance
The project demonstrates that the BEAM VM's capabilities for distributed, fault-tolerant computing can work at the operating system level. While limited and experimental, it shows the flexibility of Erlang's distributed model when freed from the traditional OS layer.
Source: Hacker News (16 points), crazierl.org