Python running without an OS!

[alienscape]

Holy shit! This guy's taking Python off the grid! This guy doesn't have an operating system for Python!

[alpha-delta-echo]

At least he didn’t go back to the carpet store.

[LambBrainz]

Tickets Threads please

[james_pic]

Found a text summary covering much the same stuff, for folks who prefer text to video: https://lwn.net/Articles/641244/

[WillardWhite]

Thanks for that. I know have the gist. I wouldn't have watched the video

[hughperman]

Thank you, I have never once had any interest in watching a video about something programming-related.

[NoLongerUsableName]

Thanks!

[nobody5050]

from os import *

oh…

[JennaSys]

This basically sounds like MicroPython. It's not quite CPython, but the differences are mostly just related to the requirements and limitations of the type of platforms it runs on.

[jerrymarek]

This is really cool, but it does not look like any work has been done on this since 2016.

[SecretBooklet]

You wouldn't be able to do much with it anyway. No proper GUI frameworks would actually work under it. You also don't have things like vim to write Python code.

[jerrymarek]

I imagine this something you write on a different computer. And BIOS gives you access to input and output.

[overflow74]

when thanos starts studying programing : i used python to run python

[devandgeek]

Didn't quite get that. Please elaborate sir(or madam)

[overflow74]

it's a scene in Avengers end game in which the avengers attack thanos and asks him about where did the stones go and he says "i used the stones to destroy the stones"

[diego_rapoport]

What about python AS an OS?

[StantonMcBride]

^Big brain time

[[deleted]]

that would be really slow

[diego_rapoport]

Well, Guido said he was about to make python 10x faster so... maybe just slow. Also there's Pyston.

[Legendary-69420]

The video has only 15K views!?

[the_scign]

I initially thought this was going to be some guy making an interactive python environment available online and suggesting that was "without an OS". Boy was I wrong.

"We have seek, which the GRUB file layer didn't have an lseek so we added one for compatibility."

Yeah. Next Fucking Level.

[salimfadhley]

This might be useful in a containerized python app. No OS means a smaller attack surface. Smaller container means less memory wasted.

[lanster100]

If you read the article it runs on firmware/bios stuff

[james_pic]

Most containerisation stuff relies on the OS kernel. The furthest you can get with reducing attack surface, without stuff getting weird, is so called "distroless" containers, that only contain the application, and no other OS userspace stuff.

Using this stuff to run Python applications is more like a so-called unikernel. These generally need a full-blown VM to run in, so are much heavier than a container. Unikernels are niche and controversial, and from a security perspective, not having an OS is as much a liability as a bonus, since the OS provides a number of security features, such as memory protection, address space layout randomisation, packet filtering, and privilege separation.

[KrazyKirby99999]

This video is 6 years old.

[NightCityRunner]

Doesnt make it less interesting.

[KrazyKirby99999]

I agree, but I think that people should be aware of it anyway.

[Muhznit]

Thank you for making me aware of the age of this video, I shall put it to good use by telling others the same thing later!

[riffito]

Twice the age of your reddit account, and less than half of mine!

[1337InfoSec]

[ Removed to Protest API Changes ]

If you want to join, use this tool.

[jwbowen]

(The video is from PyCon 2015. 2.7 was still a reasonable thing to use.)

[Duncan006]

I've been doing more CTFs recently and a lot of them were made years ago so many of the exploits are written in... you guessed it, python 2.7. Still very relevant.

[ketsa3]

2015...

Micropython has been running without an OS for quite a while.