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Dev boots a PC from Google Drive cloud storage — a storage-less laptop becomes a truly cloud-native computer
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2024
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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.
I'd argue it's a bit worse than PXE booting, since they talk about having the actual bootloader on a USB stick, whereas the same thing could have been done by having the boot process remote too.
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.
Yeah it's very common unfortunately. I didn't intend to undermine your contribution or anything. Sorry for that regardless.
Yeah apparently adding to the discussion is frowned upon here, my comment chain got derailed by a “joke” because I tried to differentiate between the cloud and a PC to have a discussion….
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.