bare metal

Definitions

1. 1

   A runtime environment where little to no abstraction is available

   A runtime environment where little to no abstraction is available: usually employing a low-level programming language, without access to any operating system facilities, and interfacing hardware directly.

   • Real programmers don't write applications programs; they program right down to the bare metal. Applications programming is for wimps who can't do systems programming.
   • Which has its pluses and minuses—it's really hard to write device drivers for bare metal in a completely type-safe language just because the levels of abstraction are wrong for talking to the bare metal.
2. 2

   Physical hardware, as opposed to virtualised.

   • A hypervisor is a thin, guest OS—independent Virtualization layer that is loaded onto bare metal, which interacts with the hardware directly and creates virtual machines in which operating systems, either enlightened or not, can run.
   • In 1998 virtualization was "rediscovered" for the x86 platform by VMWare, but due to instruction translation the approach taken was slow when compared to bare metal performance.
   • SoftLayer is focused on bare metal servers. Bare metal servers provide a higher level of freedom for the businesses in choosing their virtual servers.
3. 3

   Used other than figuratively or idiomatically

   Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see bare, metal.

   • bare-metal stent

The neighborhood