BareMetal Cloud is a minimal version of the BareMetal exokernel specifically geared for running in public/private cloud instances. This minimal version of BareMetal contains only the relevant drivers, is 10,240 bytes in size, and only uses 4 MiB of memory. All other memory is allocated to the payload.

An instance of BareMetal is running in Digital Ocean at http://baremetal.returninfinity.com and will respond to HTTP and ICMP.

The script in this repo depends on a Debian-based Linux system. macOS is also supported to build and test if you are using Homebrew.

• NASM - Assembler to build the loader and kernel.
• QEMU - Computer emulator if you plan on running a virtual machine for quick testing.
• Git - Version control software for pulling the source code from GitHub.

In Linux this can be completed with the following command:

sudo apt install nasm qemu-system-x86 git

In macOS via Homebrew this can be completed with the following command:

brew install nasm qemu git

BareMetal Cloud consists of two different projects:

git clone https://github.com/ReturnInfinity/BareMetal-Cloud.git
cd BareMetal-Cloud
./baremetal.sh setup

baremetal.sh setup automatically runs the build and install functions. Once the setup is complete you can execute baremetal.sh run to verify that everything installed correctly.

This command builds the boot sector, loader (Pure64), and kernel

This command installs the software to the disk image.

This command will run BareMetal-Cloud in a QEMU VM. Output to the serial port will be displayed to the console.

Create a VMDK disk image

The resulting BareMetal_Cloud.vmdk in sys/ will be required.

In Digital Ocean click on Backups & Snapshots and then Custom Images. Click on the Upload Image button and select the .vmdk file on your filesystem. Once the file is uploaded you can start a droplet of it by clicking on the More dropdown and selecting Start a droplet.

On the Create Droplets page you can select the Droplet Type and CPU Options. Give the droplet a name and click on Create Droplet.

In Proxmox click on the "Create VM" button. Configure the following settings:

• General - Give the VM a name
• OS - "Do not use any media"
• System - Machine: q35
• Disks - Remove the existing disk
• CPU - Provision as needed
• Memory - Provision as needed
• Network - Model: VirtIO
• Confirm - Click "Finish"

Use a utility like scp to copy the .vmdk file to the filesystem of the Proxmox server.

qm importdisk <VMID> <vmdk_filename> <storage_location>

Example - qm importdisk 101 /root/BareMetal_Cloud.vmdk local-lvm

In the Proxmox web interface select the new VM. In the Hardware section, find the new unused disk, and attach it to the VM.

Verify the "Boot Order" in the VM "Options".

Click "Start" on the VM.

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