neopanz · 15 years ago

Not sure how long ago he posted this. This guy never ceases to amaze me. He's the Grigori Perelman of Hackerdom.

michaelf · 15 years ago

This is the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my browser.

awaz · 15 years ago

interesting!

thristian · 15 years ago

The page was near-unreadable for me because the CSS uses the font stack "courier,fixed,swiss,sans-serif", and courier is just too thin and wispy against a black background. I opened Firebug and changed the CSS declaration to be "monospace" and then all was right with the world.

That said, it's a phenomenal achievement, and should be a great way for websites to demonstrate command-line tools to people. :)

(also: browsers let you store more information with DOM Local Storage than you could in a cookie; If you could expose that to Linux as a block device...)

mikeytown2 · 15 years ago

Anyone know how to get the network working? ping/wget don't work. But seriously, this is pretty flippin sweet!

EGreg · 15 years ago

this is some crazy shit

vessenes · 15 years ago

My favorite bit:

# cat /proc/cpuinfo

...

f00f bug: yes

#

Hah!

20 bogomips by the way, at least on Chrome on a MacBook Pro.

I sense a whole new era of browser performance testing..

terminus · 15 years ago

Neat. You can mount sysfs like so:

  # mkdir /sys; mount -t sysfs /sys /sys

Makes sense to me. The MVP here is cpu emulation.

jbk · 15 years ago

After FFmpeg (used in all your TVs and gadgets, very likely), QEmu (used also by Xen and VBox and other), tcc and his IOCC entries, the DVB-T emission with an ATI card, Fabrice comes, once again with something crazy...

He is really impressive...

gmosx · 15 years ago

Didn't know about this guy! Unbelievable track record of consistently releasing groundbreaking software. Oh, and the x86 js emulator is cool too! made my day!

nl · 15 years ago

~ # tcc -o hello hello.c

~ # ./hello

Hello World

That is just too impressive for me to process.

vsajko · 15 years ago

boots in firefox on android although you can't type anything. I am amazed

ramidarigaz · 15 years ago

Woohoo! Kernel panic! Haven't seen one of those in... well... forever. (Newbie here)

Edit: This is damn cool.

nkurz · 15 years ago

I'm utterly dumbfounded. Not only does it boot, it's got emacs, and a compiler.

  Welcome to JS/Linux  
  ~ # emacs test.c
  ~ # cat test.c                                                                                                                                                 
  void main(void) {                                                               
      printf("Hello World!\n");                                                   
  }      
  ~ # tcc test.c -o hello                                                         
  ~ # ./hello                                                                     
  Hello World!

js4all · 15 years ago

Unbelievable, this is like magic. I am totally impressed. It is a real linux instance. BTW. I see the hello.c file someone mentioned here. Have we all mounted the same disk image?

I see so many use cases for this, but I don't fully understand what is going on behind the scenes. Maybe someone can shed some light on it:

  1) How is the disk emulated. Is it a local image, or is it running on the backend?

  2) Is there a remote possibility to get the networking up and running?

  3) Can the disk image be externally accessed to be customized?

sagarun · 15 years ago

I just did 'rm -rf /' then ctrl+D on the terminal. Kernel Panic! Very nicely done! Technical notes here http://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html

sigil · 15 years ago

This is completely awesome. When I saw http://cb.vu a few years ago I thought hey, someone has finally done it, but that turned out to be a hack. Kudos to Bellard once again.

Nitpicking: the terminal emulation is messed up. It keeps resizing horizontally, and less gets confused. I'm sure the terminal emulator was fun to play with. A correct vt100 state machine implementation [1] would probably not be quite as fun [2]. There's a vt100.js library used by a couple projects that might improve things. [3]

[1] http://vt100.net/emu/dec_ansi_parser

[2] http://vt100.net/emu/vt500_parser.png

[3] http://fzort.org/bi/o.php

zwischenzug · 15 years ago

If anything deserves a HackerNews circle jerk, this is it.

angusgr · 15 years ago

I'm sad the source has been compressed so there's no easy human-readable View Source, like there was on the VAX emulator that came up a few weeks ago. :( Still awe-inspiring, though. :)

shykes · 15 years ago

Any volunteers to wrap a websocket transport in an network interface driver? :)

srean · 15 years ago

Feel bad to miss out on this as I am on FF 3.6. But this remind reminded me of a service from a long time ago. Dont remember their name, this was some 10 years ago. But they used to provide a KDE desktop via the browser as a java applet. It was not terribly snappy, but quite surprisingly usable. Any one remembers this ?

braindead_in · 15 years ago

Looks so similar to Linux booted on an embedded device. Nostalgia.

Qerub · 15 years ago

  ERROR: your browser is too old to run JS/Linux.
  You should use a recent browser such as Firefox 4.x or Google Chrome.

whatwhatwhat · 15 years ago

Can i run Node.js on this?

/evil grin

shazow · 15 years ago

I just forkbombed my browser. Nothing is sacred anymore.

  ~ # f(){ f|f & };f
  sh: can't fork
  sh: can't fork
  sh: can't fork
  sh: can't fork
  ...

eliben · 15 years ago

Fabrice Bellard is truly impressive. There's a nice article about him, called "Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a Superproductive programmer", here: http://www.softwarequalityconnection.com/2011/03/fabrice-bel...

gabi38 · 15 years ago

How is this thing loads the kernel? I've read the http://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html but it doesn't say, Does it loads it over the net or what?

tcarnell · 15 years ago

Awesome - so could you run a web-server from within the browser? Would it be possible to connect to an instance of jslinux remotely?

asadotzler · 15 years ago

Twice as fast in Firefox as in Chrome.

spiffworks · 15 years ago

It even has an incomplete version of Emacs. Emacs!

loso · 15 years ago

wow, it is projects like this that get the imagination going and makes you feel bad for putting off a problem set that might have frustrated you at the time.

rakkhi · 15 years ago

This looks awesome! I'm just starting to learn ruby and was going to look today on whether there was a way to run it in a browser very easily. Wonder if this is the answer

swah · 15 years ago

How long until you see the prompt?

swah · 15 years ago

And you are very proud of your Javascript templating library.

Aissen · 15 years ago

Anyone know why he used 2.6.20 ? I tried compiling a 2.6.38.6, but it doesn't boot. It's stopped at "Starting Linux" and CPU stays at 100% all the time.

dendory · 15 years ago

Fun command to use:

reboot -f

senthilnayagam · 15 years ago

this can be a good tool to for students to learn basic linux commands

/usr/bin has many goodies

vi, top, ps, grep, awk

aristidb · 15 years ago

If it doesn't work for you on Chrome 12, this is probably the reason: "it does not work with Chrome 12 beta. As far as I know, it is a bug in the browser"

From http://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html

albertzeyer · 15 years ago

Actually I thought about doing the same via LLVM and Emscripten. This seems like he emulates x86. Which is probably less hackish but also slower.

maverhick · 15 years ago

When fabrice opens the browser, the kernel compiles itself.

cfq · 15 years ago

I saw this and thought "how does it know who I am?":

io scheduler cfq registered (default)

SomeIdiot · 15 years ago

So any interesting ideas for what this can be used for?

wslh · 15 years ago

Now I can buy a Chromebook :-)

anc2020 · 15 years ago

Awesome

    cd /
    rm -rf ./*
    echo *

wildmXranat · 15 years ago

Fabrice is one of my all time favorite software engineers. Reading his code, studying his methodologies and learning by copying has been a long time task for me.

My first encounter with his code was QEmu, when it was required to run the XO OLPC linux images. Society truly benefits when people like him are devoted in support of open source software.

pbhjpbhj · 15 years ago

Anyone else wondering if they're now part of this guys compile/render farm!?

ayanb · 15 years ago

92.3 KB minified for the two JavaScript files.

wow!

brudgers · 15 years ago

>"I did it for fun, just because..."

Easily the best hack I've seen on HN.

petdog · 15 years ago

    ~ # cat over.c
    main () {
            int i = 0x00ffffff;
            while (i > 0) i--;
    }
    ~ # tcc over.c -o out
    ~ # time ./out
    real    0m 13.58s
    user    0m 13.57s
    sys     0m 0.01s

jjm · 15 years ago

This is hot! Needs logging facility too but otherwise I'm blown away!

nupark2 · 15 years ago

This is demonstrative of the advantages of the new low-level APIs being added to JavaScript to work efficiently with binary data.

Fabrice uses this to implement an x86 interpreter -- it could not be done efficiently without typed arrays. However, it is still slow -- imagine what kind of advances could be made if a common bytecode was established that would be JIT'd by the JavaScript VM, and could be output directly by the emulator.

This is why so many people want to see the browser execution environment offer more complete, low-level APIs instead of high-level APIs locked to HTML/CSS and legacy browser technology. Efficiently supporting high-performance, high-complexity systems such as an x86 emulator (or a video game, or custom font rendering, or even an application framework) absolutely require efficient low-level APIs.

bane · 15 years ago

A more advanced version would allow to use old DOS PC software such as games.

well I'm sold.

benihana · 15 years ago

First thing I did after booting?

    alias ll='ls -lh'

spydum · 15 years ago

I don't know why it's so amusing, but the network stack is fully functional for loopback. Fire up telnetd, and telnet back to yourself. telnetd -l /bin/sh -p 23 telnet 127.0.0.1 23 plenty of other services: httpd.. what a hoot.

m0th87 · 15 years ago

The emulator code is just 86 kb, and it isn't even aggressively minified!

http://bellard.org/jslinux/cpux86.js

delinka · 15 years ago

Cloud VPS in the browser. ("Please standby while we create a browser tab for your new instance...")

"The browser as the operating."

Someone must buzzword the hell out of this and then create a new startup based on it.

kmil · 15 years ago

Fabris should put donate button on the page! I would happily donate to thank him for his great contribution to the Open Source and pushing boundaries of what possible to do with modern technology. thank U Fabris :)

wonginator1221 · 15 years ago

Well, It's a great way to try out rm -rf /

hackly · 15 years ago

This reminds me of http://uni.xkcd.com/

josepsanzcamp · 15 years ago

What license do you want use to publish this job???

wicknicks · 15 years ago

He even ported his tcc compiler to it. Brilliant! I wonder if we could tap into the device file system. Given the increasing number of sensors in mobile phones and no standard way of reading from them, a linux like interface would be awesome.

  int main (int argc, char **argv)
  {
       int f = open("/dev/android_accelerometer");   
       double ax = f.read();
       double ay = f.read();
       double az = f.read();
       printf ("Current 3d acceleration: %d %d %d", ax, ay, az);
       return 0;
  }

tectonic · 15 years ago

Why is it that whenever I play with a temporary Linux install, I always end up typing "rm -rf /"?

rman666 · 15 years ago

  ~ # httpd
  ~ # telnet 127.0.0.1 80     
  get / http/1.0

  HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found                                                          
  Content-type: text/html                                                         
  Date: Tue, 17 May 2011 20:10:52 GMT                                             
  Connection: close

  <HTML><HEAD><TITLE>404 Not Found</TITLE></HEAD>                                 
  <BODY><H1>404 Not Found</H1>                                                    
  The requested URL was not found                                                 
  </BODY></HTML>                                                                  
  Connection closed by foreign host                                               
  ~ #

quattrofan · 15 years ago

but not in my android browser apparently

vecter · 15 years ago

Could someone write a program that would cause a stack overflow, compile it with tcc, and run it?

blackman · 15 years ago

now I'm wondering how hard it would be to write a commodore 64 or nes emulator in javascript to embed games in webpages?

mark-r · 15 years ago

If you have a programmers.stackexchange.com account, you might want to put a vote in here: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/47197/are-the...

tmachinecharmer · 15 years ago

There is EMACS TOO!!! This is insane. I am going mad with happiness. I really really have tears in my eyes.

plainOldText · 15 years ago

I believe this submission got the highest number of upvotes in HN history.

geekzgalore · 15 years ago

http://www.softwarequalityconnection.com/2011/03/fabrice-bel...

josepsanzcamp · 15 years ago

I tested the JS/Linux with google chrome 12 (beta and gnu/linux) with a new vmlinux26.bin and root.bin compiled using the 2.6.30 kernel with buildroot and work as expected (fine).

I don't know what is the problem of the original 2.6.20 linux kernel with JS/Linux but with this new compilation work perfectly.

mrpixel · 15 years ago

Now let's mass-email Bellard to coax him into publishing an open-source version. :)

antirez · 15 years ago

I admire Fabrice a lot, he is a programming hero for me. However it is not true that he is not interested in money, for instance the QEMU module performing the run-time code translation to go fast was not released for free in order to earn from this. I don't know if he managed to earn or not from QEMU in the end, but IMHO that of selling the module to final user was not the right strategy, when QEMU was started and became famous, "virtualization" was an huge buzz and interest for many companies, so many ways to make money from this.

Also this new code is not released under a free license, so by default as far he is not sure what he's going to do with the code the "open source way" is not the default. This is not a critique. I think Fabrice Bellard is a genius, but as an observer he seems interested in making a profit from his work like many other programmers.

Instead subjectively I've to admit today I no longer consider the GPL a completely free license, but this is another matter and may be related not to earning but to the meaning "free software" has for you. For me it is as simple as letting people to do everything with your code. IMHO the BSD license turns out to be better both for users AND for you to earn from your product later.