@izaya@social.shadowkat.net wondering how easy it would be to write a simple C wrapper around the BIOS and port PsychOS to real hardware as the world's first functional Lua OS

@melicious plain BIOS? you'd need malloc and free, and a method to interface with each different hardware attachment system, then you could write Lua-side drivers for them. UEFI or OpenFirmware give you a lot more for free.

@izaya oh no

@efi oh yes

@izaya but what does this mean? you already had filesystems and devices... why a virtual os?

@efi I don't know if you mean "why is OpenComputers" or "why are you making a filesystem for OpenComputers"

@izaya the latter
I agree with doing it just because, but does it have a practical use?

@efi it does! several, even
originally I wanted to do this because a server I played on had HDDs and FDDs be Very Expensive but tape drives were super cheap, which resulted in an "I-can't-believe-it's-not-tar" filesystem that ended up used for storing immutable packages.

The other part is that it's a lot easier to tape multiple block devices together to make a bigger one than with a filesystem, and it's straightforward enough to treat a Computronics tape as a block device - and those tapes are much bigger than hard drives and aren't much slower for sequential access - which this filesystem is very good at.

@izaya huuuuh never figured the space limits were a problem, since I only used it for inventory management and machines which needed no persistent data...

@efi admittedly I don't often run into space limitations but it's something worth keeping in mind

the big one was storing an index of all the recipes in the modpack, had to store them compressed on a T3 HDD to fit

@efi (and a T3 HDD is a lot more expensive than an equivalent tape)

@izaya :0

@efi plus if I wanted I could extend this with, for example, a tag system, now that I have a functioning filesystem

@izaya I hope you use this to do many AE2 spatial chamber shenanigans

@efi AE2 is too magic for my tastes, all my storage is StorageDrawers-based

I have been known to run racks of OC machines inside a pocket dimension though.

@izaya@social.shadowkat.net very interested in pkgfs

@melicious it's a bad clone of the Haiku packagefs, it presents the contents of the (compressed or otherwise) packages in /boot/pkg as a filesystem

@melicious https://git.shadowkat.net/izaya/OC-PsychOS2/src/branch/master/lib/pkgfs.lua