Correction: Roon Rock OS isn’t Windows emulator nor emulation from Windows environment
Most people probably know me as a Windows guy but I actually took all possibilities to improve computer audio including Mac and Linux too. I wouldn’t be able to push 100% positive feedback on Fidelizer Purist ROM for Android ROM without intensive research on Linux OS.
Today I decided to explore what’s inside Roon ROCK and see if I can improve Roon Rock image with optimizations based on my research from Linux’s audiophile OS optimizations. We’ll start exploring with Linux Reader and you also need program to unpack tar.gz file too.
There’s Linux ROONRESET partition and FAT16 CUSTOM_ROON partition. Inside ROONRESET has bootfs.img.gz for ROON OS installation loader I guess. After extracting and opening bootfs inside, It was named ROONBOOT. In there, it looks like ROONRESET but this time we have roonos-1 folder which looks like this.
This seems to be RoonOS partition to be cloned to Intel NUC’s device. there’s rootfs.img so it should contain something worth examing for further improvements. Let’s open rootfs.img and see how it looks like. I’m sure it’d be great.
Unallocated? That’s weird. But there’s no error during mounting process. Maybe it’s unsupported partition? Wait. There’s another CUSTOM_ROON partition from Roon Rock image too. Maybe this is an empty partition waiting to be created from there?
And there’s roon.tar.bz2 file. There’s nothing inside identity folder. Let’s extract roon.tar.bz2 file and see what’s inside. RoonServer folder? Cool! Let’s jump into it and see how Roon OS works!
RoonMono? Mono? It’s not what I’m guessing right? This can’t be real, right? Just to be sure, let’s open Server folder and see how it looks like.
It seems Roon Rock OS is a Linux with Mono runtime running RoonServer’s .NET code through Mono platform. MacOS version also use the same principles too and works pretty well with MacOS support through Mono.
That aside, I think it’s good idea to run Windows .NET runtime emulation software rather than making a Linux port that can be worse than main code they wrote in main code if not done right. Mono is quite powerful. Maybe not as good as .NET Runtime in Windows but getting better over time.
As for possiblity of Fidelizer optimizations on Roon Rock OS, maybe I can optimize kernel and ramdisk image with some tweaks I can apply, insert some optimizations in startup script to further improve Linux OS environment, adjust Mono configuration, etc.
But I think the best way to optimize is to moved from Windows emulation platform to native Windows platform. Running real Windows with Windows environment optimizations should be better than optimizing Linux environment to emulate what Windows does better.