Hi Colin,
But to work seriously in Sculpt one wants to install a VM, [...] It would be fantastic if one could, out-of-the box, virtualize an installed OS.
this reminds me on the article [1] by Johannes, who created Linux vs. Linux-on-Genode dual-boot scenario.
[1] https://genodians.org/jschlatow/2021-04-23-start-existing-linux-from-sculpt
I’m curious where Sculpt will go with that - will it be towards live selection of drivers at boot time, like in most Linux distros, or is the idea for lean purpose-built images that contain only the drivers necessarily for a given system?
It is not clear-cut.
Speaking for the PC, some of such driver decisions are already taken at boot time, e.g., the Intel display driver is started only if an Intel graphics device is present. The same goes for the NVMe and AHCI drivers. I think this already works quite well. Should the arsenal of drivers become much larger - e.g., covering AMD in addition to Intel - we could consider providing dedicated images.
On ARM, each board requires a custom boot infrastructure and a kernel compiled for the board. So images are board-specific and don't need much probing.
Both directions are possible and useful. The modular nature of Sculpt gives us the freedom to decide case by case.
Cheers Norman