Ersei, the developer behind this so-called Cloud Native Computer, says the project was primarily a “silly” pursuit. There is also a problem with booting from Google Drive currently being very slow. However, the dev also boasts that “the possibilities are endless” and would welcome any companies or individuals who wish to get in contact and discuss commercializing this project or something related to it.
This is different (and far less practical than Apple’s approach). This one doesn’t download the OS and store it, it pulls the files from Google drive every time they’re accessed, so it’s incredibly slow by comparison, but is technically running from the cloud. The Apple one downloads everything it needs and stores it, then pulls from that local copy.
So it’s like PXE booting without a permanent local disk. If you have enough RAM, that’s probably fine.
Or is it only downloading the kernel and loading literally everything else over the net with no RAM cache? If so, that’s terrifying.
Yeah I believe it’s loading everything over the net. I haven’t looked super closely into it. I’m not sure what, if any, practical applications there are for this. Seems like it’s just a fun impractical project. I’m here for it. But you’re right about it being terrifying lol.
I was also adding to the discussion. You commented something it reminded you of, I commented the difference between the two. This may be an important point for those who are not familiar with either of these technologies.
That’s not booting from the net that’s downloading an image and keeping it in RAM without sending any changed data back to the cloud, or needing to fetch anything once the image is downloaded.
