Genera on Bare Metal
The Symbolics Lisp machine as the whole computer: Genera boots from UEFI on an ordinary laptop and owns every core and every device. No Linux underneath.
Mission
Genera, the operating system of the Symbolics Lisp machines, runs on today's computers in the VLM, the emulator of Symbolics' Ivory processor, on top of Linux or macOS. This project gives Genera the whole machine: a small runtime takes the laptop over from the firmware, gives one processor core entirely to the emulator, and drives the hardware on the other cores, where Genera reaches it through the VLM's shared-memory channels. Genera sees, watches and controls every device from a Lisp Listener.
The project
The first target is a Lenovo ThinkPad T490s, called formeo here. The runtime is written in Rust and runs the VLM's generated x86-64 Ivory emulator as it is; drivers of its own serve Genera's disks, network, keyboard and pointer. Every piece runs in emulated hardware and against the laptop's devices from inside Linux before it runs on the bare machine. The code is in the VLM repository.