How to load BareMetal-OS onto a device.

[lancejpollard]

Hello there. I am wondering if one could explain briefly some inexpensive devices that could be used to install BareMetal-OS from scratch. I understand you can use QEMU or VirtualBox to emulate a blank slate (though I am not sure how that works, I have only used VirtualBox for Linux virtualization on a Mac), and install BareMetal-OS on that from scratch (need to learn more how this works because I still don't see how the boot process works if there is no operating system in place).

But in addition to the emulators, I am wondering if there are actual hardware devices that you can use that don't have any operating systems installed that you can try this out on. I have seen that you can use a RaspberryPI, one of the few bare-metal devices I've come across. Actually, I can't think of anything other than the RaspberryPI as a bare-metal device. But that is ARM, whereas BareMetal-kernel only currently has implemented x86-64. Wondering how you actually can test that out on a real device, I haven't seen any bare-metal x86-64 devices. A quick more recent search brings up this which points to minnowboard (currently unavailable on Amazon), but have to look more around for other x86 stuff. It seems that you have to buy a Dell laptop with Windows preinstalled, and somehow uninstall Windows. Or maybe there is a ChromeBook way. If that's the case, would love to know how that works to get initialized with an x86-64 bare-metal machine.

Anyway, thank you for your help. Looking forward to trying this out on a real device.

[ghost]

Same here, I plan to use BareMetal one day in a server farm for AI calculations in C on 8086K. Guess the limiting point is to find a supported Intel LAN card, last time I checked this idea an old Intel PCI card would be required in a PCI-E adapter to get it working. The bootloader and CPU support should be working fine I think.

[IanSeyler]

Hello everyone,

BareMetal OS will run on any common x86-64 system with a few caveats - Pure64 requires BIOS (not the new EFI) and network driver support (currently the kernel supports gigabit Intel devices). A workaround for EFI is being developed and driver support is always something I'm looking at. I've used BareMetal on multiple physical machines.

@Pummelchen You might be more interested in BareMetal Node as it gives you the ability to control multiple BareMetal systems via the network.

-Ian

[lancejpollard]

Hello! Wondering if you have a recommendation of a common x86-64 system. I looked/asked around some more and one person recommended:

Buy a motherboard, x86-64 processor, and RAM modules (plus power supply), and you will have a "bare-metal" system equivalent to an RPI.

I don't know what sort of x86-64 processor to get or which motherboard, it's a bit difficult understanding what a good resource would be :)

[ghost]

As we skip GPU stuff here, for AVX2 workload I would choose i7-8086K and OC all cores to 5.0 Ghz to get the highest IPC possible today. That CPU will soon be superseded by the i9-9900K. If AVX-512 is required I would go with Intel Xeon W-2125 which is the highest clocked Xeon with AVX-512 support. To get pure BIOS check with Supermicro for the Xeon if you can still skip UEFI, for i7/i9 I would check with ASUS support if they still have legacy BIOS mode, otherwise check with MSI.

[IanSeyler]

@lancejpollard I would suggest picking up something older so you don't spend have to spend a bunch of money. Something like an Intel D945GCLF2 or D945GCLF board would work. I've tested on both of those in the past. Any computer with a Core 2 Duo CPU would be fine as well. Really the limiting factor is whether the board has BIOS and/or EFI. All older boards have BIOS. I'm working on removing the BIOS limitation.

@Pummelchen Please keep in touch! I'd like to assist with you getting a cluster up and running using BareMetal.