"Bare metal" port of RetroArch for Raspberry Pi?

RetroArch Linux devices
#1

I recently stumbled across a port of VICE the well-known Commodore 64 emulator that runs natively on the Raspberry Pi platform:

https://accentual.com/bmc64/

In other words, no intermediate OS, the emulator is its own kernal and has direct access to the hardware. The result is a really nice “black box” solution, same aesthetic as using a real C64 or one of the expensive new FPGA implementations.

This got me thinking, I know this is a long shot, but could a port of RetroArch work like this? I know we have Lakka, but it’s still Linux based. Admittedly Lakka’s kernel allows RetroArch to access all storage devices, the networking stack and such, but for example projects such as stand-alone arcade cabinets would work nicely on bare metal.

Just an idea, I don’t have the skills to make this myself but it would be interesting to know if such a thing was viable.

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#2

It would be awesome if this can be possibile. However, Retroarch currently utelises the OS such as windows Linux and Android to update its cores and download shaders and more things, therefore to make this possible this and many other things must be implemented within Retroarch. I believe that Retroarch will run faster if this could be achieved.

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#3

And who would write drivers for tons of devices on thousands of different setups? That bare-metal c64 runs on a given target only. Then Retroarch is not an emulator, it’s a front end.