
Popcorn Linux - telotortium
http://popcornlinux.org/
======
qubex
Very interesting... my first (and last) encounter with heterogeneous OSes was
back in the mid nineties with TaOS (best reference found online is
[http://www.uruk.org/emu/Taos.html](http://www.uruk.org/emu/Taos.html) but the
website is rather wonky).

Honest question: I’m not the only one who confused this for the Popcorn Time
torrent streaming player, am I?

~~~
KenanSulayman
My first thought was: wow, they took this idea so far now they made an OS out
of it.. I imagined an OS preconfigured with torrent clients, easy-to-use VPN
client, fancy Netflix-like media center...

------
dang
An announcement from a few days ago was posted here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23060692](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23060692)
(no comments though)

A thread from 2017:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14605882](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14605882)

------
gberger
Can someone ELI5 what this is?

~~~
im_down_w_otp
It's a single system image [1] platform built with Linux. The main idea being
that the OS is running on multiple computers while presenting a single
computer abstraction to the other software running on it. You write your
program as though it's running on a monolithic machine, and the SSI platform
manages it across multiple distributed machines.

The concept is more popular in HPC & scientific computing than it is in
mainstream IT.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_system_image](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_system_image)

~~~
eliaspro
Sounds a bit like a Beowulf Linux cluster from about 20y ago. What's the major
difference between the approach of those.

~~~
detaro
Beowulf was just the idea of making a cluster of cheap commodity hardware
using open software, typically not Single System Image.

~~~
nineteen999
Yeah I was thinking this sounds more like MOSIX, but with the added
abstraction to handle executing the same code accross different architectures.

[http://www.mosix.cs.huji.ac.il/txt_about.html](http://www.mosix.cs.huji.ac.il/txt_about.html)

------
desktopninja
Name brought back fond memories of SLAX Popcorn Linux. 128MB vs ISO's today
that are 1GB+ ... what happened!?

PS. This distribution sure does sound like Beowulf

------
peter_d_sherman
Excerpt:

"The project is exploring a replicated-kernel OS model for the Linux operating
system. In this model, multiple Linux kernel instances running on multiple
nodes collaborate each other to provide applications with a single-image
operating system over the nodes. The kernels transparently provide a
consistent memory view across the machine boundary, so threads in a process
can be spread across the nodes without an explicit declaration of memory
regions to share nor accessing through a custom memory APIs. The nodes are
connected through a modern low-latency interconnect, and each of them might be
based on different ISA and/or hardware configuration."

Intuitively, I would think that the way to do this would be as follows:

First, we have the memory hierarchy, disk at the bottom, increasingly faster
(but smaller) regions of memory closer to the CPU.

Now, if let's say a process shares memory across nodes, then what seems to
make sense would be moving chunks of that memory, as needed, as "cache blocks"
to the local machine that needs it.

Observation: _That pattern is really not very different than what OS 's do
with swap files / virtual memory, except that the "swap file" is actually a
larger memory region located on a remote node, across the network..._

Of course there may be other issues with respect to locking, synchronization
objects in memory, thread scheduling, etc., etc., but if you got the above
memory access pattern right, then you'd go a long way to enabling such an
OS...

~~~
dang
Can you please stop putting "Excerpt" in your comments like that? It's enough
to use quotation marks or ">" or some other visual marker to show what you're
quoting.

The trouble with the way you're doing it is that it signals that the entire
comment is an excerpt, and since you've done it a bunch of times, that makes
your account look like a single-purpose account or a bot, neither of which are
allowed here. I was going to post a totally different reply asking you not to
do those things, and then I noticed that actually you're posting normal
replies with a nonstandard header.

~~~
peter_d_sherman
Hi Dan,

I would like to profusely apologize for using "Excerpt" in my comments for
places I excerpt other content, although, I am hoping you'd understand that
the reason I do that is for my own way of organizing my own notes... Yes, I
understand that HN is a public forum, so in order to please the forum rules
and regulations, so from this point forward I will try hard not use "excerpt".
Even though I will try not to, if I do it in the future, then understand it
was an old habit ingrained upon my stiumulus-response cortex, but nonetheless,
I will make a concerted effort not to.

~~~
dang
Hi Peter,

You're an awesome HN user. Don't sweat it for one second. Thanks!

If you simply put "> " in front of what you're quoting, it signifies the same
thing. Or you can put it in double quotes, or put asterisks around it and it
will get italicized.

~~~
peter_d_sherman
Will do!

Conversely, you are an awesome HN Admin! Keep up the great work with HN! <g>

------
p4bl0
Very interesting project, thanks for sharing!

The "open positions" page might interest some people here. They have two 2+
years postdoc positions open with no teaching duties at Virginia Tech.

[http://popcornlinux.org/index.php/positions](http://popcornlinux.org/index.php/positions)

~~~
zekrioca
Requirements are a bit overloaded though..

------
t3po7re5
Whoa! I interviewed to work on this project back in my undergrad days. Was
wondering what happened to this.

------
gumby
I note some comments saying that this is more for HPC. I’ll point out that
most mobile ARMs have different kinds of cores on the same die (the so-called
big.LITTLE approach), and of course often have utterly different functional
units (GPU) as well.

------
cyborgx7
From the name, I expected this to be a distro for a TV set-top Box to watch
movies on.

------
lowwave
Seems to be related to ChronOS Linux at
[https://www.ssrg.ece.vt.edu](https://www.ssrg.ece.vt.edu)

------
amachefe
Linux Clustering OS

------
nunoferreira
So joomla + http is still a thing in 2020....

~~~
elcomet
Why would it not? It's still very convenient to use a CMS like Joomla for non
tech people.

Http is a shame of course, nowadays most web hosting providers do it
automatically.

~~~
torartc
Joomla has never been great compared to its competitors. It's been many years
since I've even heard the name. The are tons of better cms platforms no a days

------
stargrazer
Kinda like Lustre?

~~~
zekrioca
Yes, kinda.. but lustre is for data, whereas popcorn is for computing..

------
cmeacham98
This seems to be old and possibly abandoned, given that:

\- The website is served using a self signed cert for a different domain
created in 2011 (!)

\- The last download is from March 2013 for linux 3.x

\- The last commit to the git repo was in 2016

\- The last post on the mailing list is an unanswered question from 2015

I would be interested to hear if anybody on HN knows of a similar project that
is being maintained.

~~~
christoph-heiss
The project seems still alive and active, at least according to its recent
RFC'ing from LKML [0].

For some more information, Phoronix also recently wrote an article [1] about
it, also the GitHub repo [2] seems to be somewhat active (last commit was
06-02-2020).

[0]
[https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/cover.1588127445.git.javier.mal...](https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/cover.1588127445.git.javier.malave@narfindustries.com)

[1]
[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Popcorn-...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Popcorn-
Linux-2020-RFC)

[2] [https://github.com/ssrg-vt/popcorn-kernel](https://github.com/ssrg-
vt/popcorn-kernel)

~~~
cmeacham98
Ah, you're right, it does appear to be still alive. If anyone from the popcorn
linux team sees this, please consider updating the outdated portions of your
website (and getting an HTTPS certificate). Had I never read this comment I
would have gone on unaware that the project was not dead.

~~~
warent
The homepage has a "News" section front and center with articles created as
recently as March of this year.

