On 6/27/24 8:10 PM, Jack Curran wrote:
Hello, I am interested in the possibility of using SculptOS as a server?
I am not sure how viable this is as I am still learning how to use SculptOS and what capabilities it has. But to me, it seems like the perfect server OS because it is focused on capability security and uses a micro kernel which has many benefits such as isolation/sandboxing and stability due to driver crashes being in user-space instead of kernel level etc.
I was planning to use NixOS and run several docker containers as my home NAS and email server, however, I see no reason why I couldn't run docker containers in a virtual machine on Sculpt OS instead? Then it would be a lot more secure and an interesting project to try and use it as a server.
I plan to use the HPE Proliant Microserver Gen10 Plus V2 which is an Intel based server computer. So it should be compatible with SculptOS.
Sorry for the late response. This is actually an important and timely topic for me, so I also apologize in advance for being long-winded.
Your idea should definitely work (excluding any issues of hardware compatibility). You can choose between VirtualBox and Seoul for running VMs - they both can use the same virtual disk files, and you can even switch back and forth! (You can look in the archives for this ML about a month or two ago; Alexander answered several of my questions on this topic.) As you probably already know, all the Genode devs use this for their daily work.
Do you mind if I ask what software you run for your e-mail and NAS servers?
The reason I ask is that I have a similar setup to yours, but yours sounds more advanced than mine. I have a (primitive) e-mail server running in a VirtualBox Linux VM, which has served me well so far (migrating from Windows host to Linux, and soon to Genode), but a docker container would be even better. For file serving, I run an NFS server in my VM host (also Linux). (Migrating this is proving to be a two-edged sword, but that's another story.)
My immediate goal is to switch to Sculpt as my VM host, using my existing VMs. But the ultimate goal is to port the server software directly to Genode, and I would certainly be willing to switch to whatever is deemed worthy to port by those who know a lot more about it that I do.
Your comment also brings up the possibility of porting docker to Genode. I wonder if the new Linux device driver porting paradigm would help here. Interesting...
Happy Sculpting!
John J. Karcher devuser@alternateapproach.com