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I have never seen "bare metal" used to mean anything other than running directly on the hardware instead of through an OS, so I guess the term simply means different things in different communities. The group of people who understand "bare metal" to mean what I mean by it is much larger than "virtually nobody".

Based on other comments here, it appears this is not as clear as I thought. I can see it being used either way, but definitely understand that in the “pre-virtual-machine” era, it could be used this way.

Ah yes the "virtually" nonexistent sector of embedded development that "virtually nobody" works in.

It's not "used in some very specific circumstances", it's the very definition of bare metal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare_machine