So I won’t lie – when reports started coming out about Google’s new Chrome OS, I was completely devastated. I liked to pretend I was making Braydix ‘just for fun’, but I think I had always secretly hoped that I might someday make a product of some sort out of it. Google’s announcement basically means the chances of that are nearly completely shot. That did not make me happy, to say the least.
But it’s been some time, and I’ve cogitated on it and pondered and moped, and I think I’m going to keep messing with what I’ve got. There are a few possible outcomes
- Google claims their software will be open source. So there’s nothing preventing me from taking whatever I want from that and integrating it with whatever I’ve got. I’ve got a pretty nifty filesystem, and a pretty tight high-level architecture for stuff.
- Or, if they really do a great job (very likely), I could just switch to it, completely. Whatever services or things I make available to my ‘thing’ can probably be made to be just as available to the Googlers.
- Or if their licensing terms are horrible, or their product is Big Brother-ey, I become the ‘friendlier’ alternative.
- Or maybe Braydix just becomes irrelevant.
The likelihood is that Chrome OS will suck whatever amount of developer-juice and hobbyist-interest away from me, and to them. I don’t foresee that changing.
But whatever the GOOG does, they cannot take away from me what I’ve learned, or what I’ve built, and if they make something that I don’t like, I can always make sure that I am making something I do like.
I do think the amount of time I spend on Braydix will decrease. It’s natural – when I have something that isn’t so unique and wonderful and clever as I thought it was, the impetus to work on it decreases. And when Google is advancing the same thing as I am, their bandwagon is a touch bigger than mine.
All that being said, though, here’s a nifty new version of Braydix. It does lots and lots of clever things, but to the end-user just looks like it boots up into a browser, and that’s it. When there are software updates to be had, there’s no ‘updating’ process that has to be run, the new version is just ‘there’. There’s even room for some way of running third-party apps. As a neat little aside, it will even work completely disconnected from the internet…though since all it does is browse the web, there’s not much of a point. Yet. Anyways seems pretty simple, but the truth is far more complicated…
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Like any Linux distro, Braydix uses its own initramfs as the tiny bare-minimum memory-based filesystem from which to mount the ‘real’ root filesystem. The Braydix initrd looks for a ‘cache’ hard drive that it can boot from, and boots from it if it can. If it doesn’t find one, it uses a special “bootstrap file” to prepare a minimal set of files that so that it can boot up and launch a browser (and network config utilities and disk config utilities, etc). Once I got the files down to a size where they would fit, I used a ‘CRAMFS’ file to jam them into (it’s a special compressed filesystem).
Once the initramfs has loaded, it passes control on to the cache HD, or the minimal filesystem from the bootstrap. That’s the piece that manages to overmount crestfs over the current ‘web cache’ (whether it be a disk or temp files). CREST-fs is the crazy thing that I built that allows you to mount the whole of the Web as a filesystem. The ‘overmounting’ trick is tougher than it seems – the very files you’re running off of are the ones that are being replaced by a new copy! Gotta be careful – and debugging is a bitch. The cache that it’s overmounted-over is treated as cache, and if the contents are ‘current’, newer versions won’t have to be grabbed from the internet.Then it launches the browser.
The result? a 30 meg ISO. And I haven’t really gotten deep into trying to squeeeeeze and scrunch the files in there down (but I don’t think it will help much). and that 30 meg ISO could have give you access to a huge and complex back-end system – as I am expecting to do. It’s really fun putting things *not* on the bootstrap file, but on the server, and watching them show up on my test VM. That’s probably what’s happening next – write support (somehow), C compiler, and getting it all to be ‘self-hosting’ – instead of using a Redhat install as my ‘workstation’ to develop this, I will use instead a Braydix install to develop it. That will be fun!
Oh, and F google. F ’em in the eye. They’re starting to really freak me out.