New! MIT's Xv6 Operating System Now Available At MetalVPS Labs! (March 18, 2022)

Originally published at https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/3912/new-mits-xv6-teaching-operating-system-now-available-at-metalvps-labs/p1 on March 18, 2022

Republished here on July 12, 2022 because this might have been the source for @yoursunny's plagiarized /s additional disclaimer suggestions for @FlorinMarian

Thanks to @yoursunny for his wonderful sense of humor and kindness to everyone.

Thanks yet again to @jbiloh for Freedom of Speech here on Low End Talk.

May we please say that MetalVPS base pricing continues at $20.22 per month? But people who cannot afford the base price are welcome to send their own discounted offers via PM or via the email on my profile. Even free accounts are not impossible.

Friendly greetings to all! 🗽🇺🇸🇲🇽🏜️🌎🌍

MetalVPS Labs continues! You are invited to join us!

Our Antique Server, Darkstar

Server: HP BL460c G6

CPU: 2 x Xeon L5630 4-Core = 8 cores = 16 threads

RAM: 48 GB DDR3 ECC

Hard Drive: 2 x 400GB SAS SSD, Hardware RAID 1

IP Addresses: IPv4/29, IPv6/64

Connection: 1 GBit/s port

Bandwidth: 10 TB

Datacenter: Colocated with Level One Servers inside Carrier-1, Dallas, Texas, USA 🇺🇸

Node OS: Slackware64-current! 🤩

VM OS: Whatever you want via KVM or LXC!

KVM: Bleeding edge Qemu is sometimes updated, recompiled, and reinstalled on Darkstar. It's been tested with the latest Debian daily sid "nocloud" images. Debian seems to work well with additional IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for each VPS. We still haven't yet figured out why NetBSD and OpenBSD start, but do not complete, booting. If you are a BSD freak and a Qemu ace, please do stop by and give your neighbors a clue.
LXC: Comes built-in on Slackware64-current, so LXC is expected to be available, but hasn't yet been tested on Darkstar. 😎
Darkstar was installed with a separate 100 GB /altroot primary partition. /altroot is great for Linux from Scratch, Slackware from Scratch, debootstrap, and more. Of course, just running something in a Slackware chroot environment is equally fine.

What You Get

ssh to shell account or VNC to GUI (KDE, Xfce, more) on Darkstar. You probably can spin up a few KVM VPSes or LXC containers. We have extra IPv4s and IPv6s waiting for you. Plus you can run MIT's Xv6 Teaching Operating System. Please see "Current Project," below.
Reasonable access to all resources. No arbitrary limits. Reasonable access without arbitrary limits means, for example, that a single MetalVPSian could run more than one VPS, could use more than one IPv4 and IPv6, etc.
Currently there are four MetalVPSians including @Not_Oles. 🤩 As of this writing nobody is running any continuous services.

YABS

Posted here.

Upcoming Projects

Try to install Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC). Thanks to @yoursunny for suggesting this project.
Read a little more of Low-Level Programming by Igor Zhirkov.

Current Project

MIT 6.S081: Operating System Engineering.

Darkstar already has Qemu to run VPSes. Here's Darkstar compiling the RISC-V GNU toolchain also needed for Xv6:

And here's Xv6 ready to go:

Pricing and How to Join

Please craft and send your own LES Exclusive custom discount offer. Offers sent together with coupon code "please" are more likely to be accepted.
Accounts may be requested by active members of the LES community and by others whose web presence or references are deemed sufficient by MetalVPS.
To request an account, please post here, PM @Not_Oles, or use the email on @Not_Oles' LES profile.

When and How to Pay

No payment is due until after your account is set up and you are 100% satisfied.
Payments available via Paypal or Stripe.

Warnings!

Clueless™ administrator! 😀 @Not_Oles frequently messes up! 😱
Hey! Darkstar runs Slackware64-current! 🤩
Sometimes trusted MetalVPSians might or might not get sudo. 🙈🙉🙊
Delivery might take awhile! 😴
No warranty, to the extent permitted by applicable law. No service level agreement. Not for business use. Intended especially for computer learning and fun! 🤑
White Hat stuff only, please! No copyright violations, please. 👍
@Not_Oles tries to keep the system updated. Frequent maintenance reboots are guaranteed! It's horrifying 😱 or amazing ✨💖✨ how up-to-date Slackware64-current is! @Not_Oles has been updating almost every day for months, first on a VM on the former MetalVPS Hetzner node and now on Darkstar in Texas. Upstream issues an update, and -- within a day or two -- that update scrolls past while slackpkg update is running.
Please make your own redundant, offsite backups! It's easy to download or sync or clone your backup to a safe place. Please also make sure that you actually can restore from your backups! Please think of your MetalVPS account as ephemeral! 🤦‍♂️
MetalVPS.com is an indie project of @Not_Oles a/k/a Tom Miller with help from the MetalVPSians. MetalVPS.com is neither a lowendspirit.com nor a leveloneservers.com project. 👨‍💻
Other MetalVPSians can see your account name, some of the processes you are running, and much other information. So, please do not put confidential information on the server. 🤔