Linux kernel runs inside web browser

An independent programmer has used JavaScript to build a PC emulator capable of running Linux inside a web browser. French hacker Fabrice Bellard says his JavaScript PC Emulator can run the 2.6.20 Linux kernel inside Mozilla's Firefox 4 and Google's Chrome 11, two browsers designed to significantly advance JavaScript speeds. " …

[AdamWill]

Practical uses

"Bellard believes his emulator could be used for client-side cryptographic processing. Or – if you're looking for a more serious pursuit – he also points out it could eventually let you play old DOS games."

A wag on another comment thread pointed out that if only someone could get Apache to run on it, you could have penguins all the way down...

[Pawel 1]

Is it just me...

or do you also think that there would be a lot of people interested in this and thinking of Chrome OS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oooh....

I wonder if you could get Google to implode in a puff of logic?

Google: You can't run anything on Chrome OS, it's all in the browser

Man: But this Javascript emulator allows you to run a fully featured PC in the browser, so you can install run anything you want natively

Google: Gahhh?!?

[Ammaross Danan]

Chrome

Nah, Chrome's already covered: Native Code plugin FTW!

(yes, sarcasm)

[Eddy Ito]

The real question

Will it run Emacs... on the iPhone? Muwahahahahahahaha!!!

No, really?

[David Hicks]

LOL

Apparently not so much yet, the iPhone browser won't run it, instead the emulator puts up a "Browser not supported" message.

I got it running in Firefox on my N900 though :)

[Robert Heffernan]

LOLOL

And I had it running in Firefox on my Galaxy S!

[bazza]

@David Hicks, absurdity

OK so it doesn't work on an iSomething yet. But how long before we see Steve Jobs start trashing Javascript?

The language is only going to get faster on Androids, Blackberries, etc. and as it does so the opportunities for things like this to become more serious and more capable will only increase.

Now it would be an absurd way to run whatever software you like on a phone. You'd need a pretty good network connection for storage (I'm presuming that Javascript can't store data locally on an iPhone). The battery consumption is going to be terrible in comparison to running an equivalent native application. But with such restrictive practises eminating from His Jobness it is quite possible that absurdity will not be such a high barrier afterall.

[ThomH]

@bazza

Apple shipped a major speed boost to the Javascript engine in Mobile Safari in iOS 4.3, though they got slammed — rightly or wrongly — for not applying it to the entire OS. It's not just "going to get faster on Androids, Blackberries, etc", it is getting faster on Androids, Blackberries, iPhones, etc.

The iPhone supports the latest HTML 5 database stuff, for local persistent store, as does Android. Blackberry doesn't.

Even since the App Store launched and Apple stopped saying "HTML + Javascript is the API", they've failed to become more restrictive. Every added restriction on one side, such as the 70:30 rule for subscription content, is balanced by one eased on the other, such as the removal of the C/C++/Objective-C/Javascript rule for apps which allows people to use Adobes development tools if they wish.

To my knowledge, Jobs has spoken out publicly only against Flash. The arguments he made that it offers a very poor user experience on mobile have been backed up by every objective review I've seen of the Android client. I doubt I'm alone in having decided never to download the thing onto my Android phone. His conclusions — to ban Flash from his platform — betray his control tendencies but the initial observations were valid.

So, in response to your post: (i) Apple have been improving their Javascript implementation; (ii) Apple do support local storage for Javascript applications; (iii) Apple's maniacal level of control over the iPhone platform has remained more or less constant rather than being some sort of ever-growing all encroaching beast; and (iv) Jobs has publicly trashed technologies only when they deserve to be trashed (his actions following the trashing being the objectionable bit, not the trashing itself).

History has also shown Apple to be a beneficial contributor to the web ecosystem, being the driving force behind the vast majority of WebKit development (it was forked from KHTML when that project was four years old, which was nine years ago) and the originator of the canvas element and 2d/3d CSS transforms amongst others. As far as I can think, they've done nothing at any time to hurt the development and propagation web standards.

I'd therefore suggest that Javascript will remain just as viable on iPhones as everywhere else in the world, give or take that Apple's Javascript implementation tends to lag Google's in speed increases.

[Mike Moyle]

@ bazza Re: "iP*d storage

"You'd need a pretty good network connection for storage (I'm presuming that Javascript can't store data locally on an iPhone)."

I wonder if it would work with one of the battery-powered Seagate drives for iP*d that the Reg reported on on Monday... http://www.reghardware.com/2011/05/16/seagate_goflex_satellite/

[M Gale]

Choc Chip or Ginger Nut?

"(I'm presuming that Javascript can't store data locally on an iPhone)"

Giganto-cookies? Base64 encoding?

Oh yes I'm that perverse.

[rciafardone]

Perverse... or evil

<Insert evil laughter here>

[The Fuzzy Wotnot]

No no no!

Will it allow me to run the game Syndicate in a browser!

[copsewood]

don't know about emacs

That would be cool, but I've tried it and it runs vi just fine. I've also got the thing to compile a C program (tcc command) and to execute an ash shell script. It doesn't have any networking or ability to upload/download any files - so it's a closed world inside the emulation currently.

[Mike VandeVelde]

for he's a jolly good fellow!

cheers! :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone for Digger?! :D

'nuff said!

[ratfox]

Can you run Wine on it?

I'll get my coat

[MinionZero]

How about running a VM on it!

@"Can you run Wine on it?"

If we run a VM on it, we can install any OS on it we like! :)

So for example, how about ...

Browser -> JavaScript -> Linux kernel -> VM -> WindowsXP -> Amiga Emulator -> ZX81 Emulator! :)

With a VM, the possibilities are endless :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo dawg

I heard you like teh internets so we put a browser in a VM in your browser so you can browse while you browse

[Martin Budden]

Mr

I know he explains why he did this, but... WHY???

[Ken Hagan]

Re: WHY???

To gain Respect from the sort of person who doesn't need to ask why.

Curiously enough, although both Javascript and the Linux kernel are the work of Satan, getting the latter to run inside the former is somehow ... angelic.

[rciafardone]

Abomination i say to thee!

Emulation must be only of a OS into a onother OS, not a OS inside a "machine" with a script language running on a browser!!! it is madness!!! MADNESS!

Fire because you must all burn at the stake...

[The Fuzzy Wotnot]

Simply because!

I take landscape and abstract photos purely for my own amusement, I share them on a website but I mainly take them to exercise the other half of my brain. I don't expect anyone to like them, I'm not really that bothered what people think of them.

Sometimes it's fun to do something for no other purpose that your own enjoyment. It's not a crime to be completely unproductive sometimes, it's very good for the soul and helps keep the old noggin on balance.

I work with two or three people who spend their entire lives worrying about work, their house and their financial portfolio and nothing else. They get so stressed about the smallest things upsetting any of these three subjects. Seems like the quickest way to the graveyard to me, but there you go.

It'd be a boring world if we all liked the same thing I suppose.

[A J Stiles]

Why?

For approximately the same reason why people climb mountains, swim large bodies of water, walk trails of several hundred kilometres or visit unexplored or inaccessible places.

Mine's the one with the Lofty Wiseman baccy tin survival kit in the pocket and the compass on the zip puller .....

[Robert E A Harvey]

Turing

Didn't St Alan prove that any programmable could be made to emulate any other?

(could != should)

[Naich]

Useful

It's got emacs, vi and a compiler. This could actually be useful. It's a shame there is no permanent storage or working network stack.

Also, you can get a cheap thrill by "rm -rf /"ing and watching the poor thing eat itself.

[Anonymous Coward]

title

"Also, you can get a cheap thrill by "rm -rf /"ing and watching the poor thing eat itself."

Excellent!

[captain veg]

shame there is no permanent storage

Don't understand.

You aren't one of those strange people that turns their computer off, are you?

-A.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I did it just for fun"

Someone buy that man a beer! Anything, just to get him out of the house...

[jake]

Why? The mind boggles ...

You have an OS that runs a modern browser that runs a glorified scripting language ... and then you re-implement that OS on top of that scripting language?

Yeah, I grok that the browser & scripting language run on other OSes ... but somehow this seems to me to be a bit of "look at MEEEEEEE!" techie masturbation, with no actual useful RealWorld[tm] use.

I could be wrong. It's been known to happen.

[Sam Liddicott]

He didn't do it for you

He didn't write it for you, and surely your inability to find a RealWorld[tm] use is a problem with your own RealWorld[tm] or your own imagination.

The author said he wrote it for fun. I find that to be a good enough RealWorld[tm] application - for the one having the fun, that is.

I had fun with it too.

[John Wilson]

"Why did you climb the mountain?" "Because it was there"

Not everything is done because it is useful. Somethings are done just because someone looked and said "I wonder...", others are done because someone was bored, some because it looked interesting.

Someone got a Linux emulator running in JavaScript. If you can't just look at that and say "wow, that's freaking COOL", and find that to be enough, you're kind of missing the point.

[Anonymous Coward]

'a bit of "look at MEEEEEEE!"'

would you say that it's similar in that way to endless posts bragging about horse ranches, wineries, yachts, Cadillacs and Rolls Royce cars, implausible numbers of degrees, SAIL, Berkeley/Stanford (whichever it was, probably both), Slackware, ..?

FB's list of achievements is real and seems to suggest that attention-seeking is not his goal.

"to each his own", I suppose..

[dssf]

I wish IBM would hire talent like him and resurrect Lotus SmartSuite

and bring it up to date instead of that current offering that IBM is pushing.

It's very impressive that he did this just for fun. It's amazing what determined developers can do when they want. Too bad big companies don't always think about the user this way.

[jake]

@AC 11:45 (and a few point to ponder for the rest of youse ...)

Not bragging. Illustrating, to make a point.

Please note that I stated quite plainly that I do not own Cadillacs, nor Rolls Royces. Please read for comprehension.

FB's name is attached to his useless (although amusing) hack. It's a good hack, I'll go there ... along the lines of SCO's UNIX port to the 8088. But unlike the original SCO[1], FB seems to be calling attention to himself; showboating, if you will.

Me? Not so much. I'm not exactly putting my name out there, now am I?

This hack is *roughly* equivalent to writing an 8088 emulator in Qbasic, and then running MSDOS 3.0 on it under MSDOS 5.0 on a 386sx16 ... Looking at it that way, it's kinda pointless, no? FB could do a lot more good working on video & wireless drivers instead ...

Looking forward to many more "thumbs down" :-)

[1] If you don't know what I mean by "SCO Xenix", kindly don't bother replying. Ta.

[sabroni]

no idea what you mean by "SCO Xenix"

but I'm confused by your definition of hack. Writing a processor emulator isn't a hack. Making an existing piece of software do something it wasn't designed to is a hack. Javascript is a language and this guy has written an emulator in it. He hasn't hacked anything, he's created a pretty cool piece of code.

This isn't roughly equivalent to doing anything in Qbasic. Javascript is everywhere these days, on devices of all sizes from many manufacturers, running server side and client side. So this actually enables 486 emulation just about anywhere.

You consider this work to be kinda pointless? He did it for fun. If you don't think having fun can be a valid reason for doing something then your life must be a bundle of laughs......

[jake]

@sabroni

"I'm confused by your definition of hack."

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html

"This isn't roughly equivalent to doing anything in Qbasic."

Basic was the javascipt of the late '70s, 80s & early '90s.

"So this actually enables 486 emulation just about anywhere."

I had VM hardware machines "just about anywhere" on bare hardware a couple decades ago, WITHOUT the need of an additional OS, browser, scripting language, and hardware emulator to run the OS and software.

"Fun" is a matter of perspective. KISS is an engineering principle I adhere to ...

[sabroni]

@jake 19:10

>http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html<

yeah, that's one definition, a brief scout round the interwebs reveals quite a few others, but I take you point.

"Basic was the javascipt of the late '70s, 80s & early '90s"

Well, sort of, but javascript implementations are all based on w3c script standards. QBasic wouldn't run on a commodore pet, a spectrum or an atari st. Whereas Javascript is genuinely able to run on devices from mobile handsets to web servers. So I disagree here, basic is too fragmented and non-standard to claim it's the same as contemporary javascript.

"I had VM hardware machines "just about anywhere" on bare hardware a couple decades ago, WITHOUT the need of an additional OS, browser, scripting language, and hardware emulator to run the OS and software"

These days most pcs have an os, browser and scripting language. So running this would be much less effort than setting up the bare hardware and virtual machines you mention. So maybe keeping it simple from a client perspective is also valuable?

[GatesFanbois]

title

Yo Dawg we heard you like OSs so we put an OS in your browser on your os so you can use the OS in your browser while its running on your OS

[ChrisC]

Why?

"... and then you re-implement that OS on top of that scripting language?"

No, then you implement some virtual hardware capable of running the original implementation of that OS. The end result may currently appear the same - OS running within a browser, woo - but whereas re-implementing the OS would have only ever given us the ability to run that OS within the browser, implementing a virtual PC instead gives us the potential (within the restrictions of the virtual hardware) to do other stuff too.

[Zippy the Pinhead]

@ ChrisC

So if you virtually turned off the wrong PC within your VM would that cause a blackhole that sucked in the entire planet? lol

[juice]

There's lots of uses for a JavaScript x86 emulator

It's worth noting that the emulator isn't emulating the OS; it's emulating the hardware which the OS runs on. Which makes it a lot more useful.

I've no doubt that this was at least partially done just because it could be done, and the limitations of JavaScript mean it's severely hampered in some respects (file access, network access, etc). Then too, it probably needs a few optimisation passes - 486-level performance isn't particularly useful these days. But the point still remains: with JavaScript interpreters being so widely available, this provides a sandboxed way of running x86 code on virtually any piece of modern hardware in the world, whether it's a phone, tablet, laptop, settop box or something else altogether...

It's also worth noting that while it's probably the most ambitious JS-emulator to date, this is far from the first - there was a ZX Spectrum emulator released back in 2008...

http://matt.west.co.tt/spectrum/jsspeccy/

[rciafardone]

it has a lot of Potential aplications.

With it you could theoretically test any program for one OS AND architecture on top of another.

Heck you could automatize testing by running a program with deferent virtual peripherals.

Imagine if a game companies could taste their games on any imaginable hardware configuration without having to actually buy and set the irons.

A small farm of computers could easily reproduce the performance of a high end machine.

[jake]

@rciafardone

"With it you could theoretically test any program for one OS AND architecture on top of another."

I've been doing this with VMs on raw hardware for a couple decades ... without an additional browser & scripting language and hardware emulation & OS & program getting in the way.

Sometime KISS just makes sense ...

[Adze]

LOLOLOL

...and now HTC Desire running Fennec (but with no soft keyb was a little redundant. Trackball button funtions as return key so definitely running and not hanging)

[Paul 129]

NO FAIR

I had to lookup fennec! There sooo cute!!!! I want one

[Avalanche]

Woohoo infinite recursion!

Just load Linux, start Firefox, load Linux-in-browser, start Firefox etc etc.

BTW: "the man [..] now servers as senior JavaScript architect", seriously? Servers?

[Anonymous Coward]

title

"BTW: "the man [..] now servers as senior JavaScript architect", seriously? Servers?"

I thought all nerds did that? I certainly do.

[Mike Flugennock]

re: Woohoo!

"Just load Linux, start Firefox, load Linux-in-browser, start Firefox etc etc..."

Ouch. My head just exploded.

[dssf]

And, run VirtualBox in that infinite recursion

And add enhanced, faster networking than the UART...

Add RAM, strong graphics, super CPU... this might make for one hell of a honey net add-on... Imagine setting up and tearing down virtual nets in a honeynet that -- if desired -- traverses the Net to other honey nets.

[sabroni]

that reminds me..

.. of being 16 years old, in my first job and noticing that you could shell to a cpm command prompt from inside a cpm command prompt. Oh the hilarity of watching people type "quit" (or was it "exit") only to see the command prompt appear again. Some things never grow old.....

[Paul 129]

How many vms can dance on the head of a pin?

Or of course how many of vms are required till the app runs a vista speed?

Tux, cause i'm still amused at what MS stuff, deep down, bodged recursion.

[Tom 7]

This may be the only way

MS ever gets windows to run on ARM!

[Dr Patrick J R Harkin]

"it could eventually let you play old DOS games."

Give.

Now!

[HollyHopDrive]

that surely is....

....one hell of an geek. My hat off to him.

[Havin_it]

All very well, but

Can it run Crysis?

All right, I'm going

[Captain Scarlet]

Hmm

Very interesting but what if people start using it to load customised OS's to start their spam runs. If its run from an iframe a user might even know about it and could be used to replace traditional malware :S

Although DOTT or The Dig in a web browser :)

[Jon 37]

No networking

The virtual PC doesn't have a network adapter. So it can't send spam.

Remember, this is running inside a browser, it doesn't let you do anything you can't do already with Javascript. And, as far as I know, you can't send e-mail from Javascript. (Unless you use a badly-secured email-sending web page - but that's not really "sending e-mail from Javascript", it's just "submitting a web form from Javascript").

[Captain Scarlet]

Blast :(

Should have picked up on that, thanks for correcting me

[Anonymous Coward]

Whaddaya mean, "no networking"?

It's got a virtual UART. SLIP, anybody?

[copsewood]

Security implications probably very significant

Once the next model comes out with a network adaptor. But, my (possibly wrong) understanding of Javascript is that this should only be able to network with the site your browser obtained the Javascript code from ? I can still see some very useful potential applications for that.

Other interesting security implications is that this will enable somewhat more serious fuzz testing of Javascript implementations. I expect to see some significant sandbox breakouts reported as a consequence, and intelligence agencies will of course be very interested in obtaining zero day exploits which don't get patched and which they can use for targeted client exploits.

[TheProf]

This kind of nonsense must be stopped.

"– his JavaScript PC emulator is about two times slower on ....."

Do you mean 'half as fast'?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's like

Or "twice as fast", which a bit of rejigging. It's like saying twice or thrice is a crime now. Thanks America!!!!

[Patrick O'Reilly]

WebGL

What's actually required is WebGL and the HTML5 File API. I'd be interested to see the speed of this in Opera, but will have to wait till 11.50 to try it out.

So does this mean that Google's NaCl could just run native in the browser itself?

[Anonymous Coward]

Performance benchmark?

Bogomips (as reported during Linux boot)

Random 3 year(ish) Dell X86 (3GHz?): native 6000ish BogoMIPS

In the emulator: 20 BogoMips

Does that make it about a 10MHz 486/33? Correction welcome.

You get a C compiler so does anyone want to try CoreMark?

Amazing stuff either way though.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bogomips

I think it just says 20.21 Bogomips for everything? I've tried it on different machines, even browsers and always get that number.

Agree, we need better benchmarks.

[Pete 43]

Very Rock'n'Roll

I did it for myself, if other people like it, great!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is madness.

And I love it! Cool stuff.

[Herby]

Reminds me of the story...

...of a TECO contest a (long) while ago. All sorts of entries, but when the last guy got a PDP-10 emulator running (under TECO!) everybody else just gave up and awarded him the prize. Kinda equivalent.

As everyone says: Not very useful, but an interesting exercise, and possible benchmark!

[Richard 120]

keyboard

Well DUH!

[Rinsey]

Impressive...

...Most impressive. Agree with others above saying "why"/"it's not useful". But it is still great.

[Gerrit Hoekstra]

Nice! So, what is it useful for then?

The potential uses may not yet be obvious, but I predict that this abstraction will create another little software revolution. Watch this space!

[ez2x]

Amazing...

@AC: I think the 486 was 2 clocks/instruction, so 40 MHz. Those were actually on sale at one time.

Compare this amazing to the latest news on Windows: another trojan from drive-by downloads, and incompatibilities between windows 7/8/arm/x86 versions.

[Bruno Girin]

Chromium...

...as shipped in Ubuntu 10.10 runs it fine too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ultimate cloud computing

Surely the ultimate in cloud computing, when your entire workstation OS including all productivity apps are loaded up from a browser and hosted in the "cloud".

And for those who say "why?" I say "why not?".

I bet these were the same people who were naysaying virtual machines in the late 90s...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why

In answer to the question, Why? I would cite "Lemmings" as one of the least useful programs ever made. But one of the best.

[Anonymous Coward]

Lemmings you say?

http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/

[Andrew Wigglesworth]

It's Linux that he's used.

Well, RMS is proven right again, we should be saying GNU/Linux when talking about the operating system.

GNU is an operating system that can use Linux as it's kernel.

To other posters (just a couple of them) ...

No, you can't do rm -rf, that would require the GNU operating system and GNU rm. Look it up.

Run "Linux" and then Firefox and then load Linux etc recursively. No, because that would take the GNU/Linux operating system at each level.

Sorry to get annoyed about this but how are we supposed to have any sort of sensible conversation about the very interesting thing that this guy has done when people's understanding has been so corrupted.

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop.

Saying "GNU/Linux" ... ain't gonna happen. Sorry. You can complain. Or realise your battle was lost a long time ago. Back in ... say ... 1991. The weight of bodies is against you. Stop being so prissy. It's not that we don't understand. It's that we're human. And lazy.

In fact, I don't even know how to say it. Gee Enn You Slash Linux? Noo Linux? Guh Noo Slash Linux? Oh ... apparently it's the last. Fuck off, Stallman.

"No, you can't do rm -rf, that would require the GNU operating system and GNU rm."

Frankly, that almost makes me want to use windows.

[Zephyrus Spacebat]

Please run rm --help

~ # rm --help

BusyBox v1.18.3 (2011-05-14 13:22:58 CEST) multi-call binary.

I'm sorry, but this is BusyBox. BusyBox is GPL, yes, and they have gone after GPL violators, yes... but that doesn't suddenly make it GNU coreutils! Even though there may be some kind of GNU in there (I'm not /exactly/ sure what's part of the provided JS/Linux), it is possible to make a Linux-based OS without enough GNU software to warrant it calling GNU/Linux.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busybox

[Francis Boyle]

Sheesh

It 's enough to make me want to sit down and write replacements for all the GNU utils just to stop nonsense like this and I only know Javascript.

Wait . . .

[Michael Habel]

Yes, but

can it run Duke Nuke'em 3D on it?

[Cihatari]

Nice idea, with one further addition..

If he went a bit further and added an emulated Gravis Ultrasound card, then you've got the perfect mid-nineties demo scene rig. Crystal Dream 2 anybody?

[M Gale]

Second Reality ftw

Future Crew, please come back and show the modern pretenders how it's done!

(that said, Farbrausch have done some p. cool stuff...)

[Pseu Donyme]

Übercool :)

Quite a feat (being kind-of useless as such makes it Art :).

[John Smith 19]

A very useful Frenchman

Have a bottle of ol wife beater on mois.

[alk]

iPad

I _think_ it's running in Safari on the iPad. I get a green flashing cursor on black.

BUT I can't get it to show the keyboard, so I'm a bit stuck...

Damn, that would have ben fun ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

Think he's working on that

It didn't get to the cursor this morning plus now there's a clipboard button and text field too.

[Captain Thyratron]

If this can run in a web broswer,

then what the hell is wrong with Flash?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure the way you meant

But this actually uses less CPU % than Flash does doing much less.

[A J Stiles]

I'll tell you what's wrong with Flash .....

Absence of Source Code is what's wrong with Flash.

If you want to do something more productive than bitch about it, try making a donation to the GNASH project.

[Anonymous Coward]

I cleverly switched this around...

...by running a web browser from within an installation of Linux.

Paris, because, we're both, like, well smart.

[Old Handle]

JS has sure come a long way

I remember when it was only used to put annoying scrolling text on the status bar and disable right-clicking.

[Ian 55]

The man's a genius

There is no other word for it. I saw his name at one of the French science museums a couple of weeks ago in relation to Pi - he smashed the record for generating the number of decimal places.. on a PC - and thought 'I recognise that name'.

Stick DR/PC/MS-DOS on this one, and you could run his first claim to fame, LZExe, on it.

[FrankAlphaXII]

Turing Award?

Coming from a Browser Development and Q&A background, Id say this emulator needs a nomination for a Turing Award. This is probably the geekiest and overall coolest thing ive ever seen run in a browser. If Thacker can get it for Ethernet and the Alto, Bellard needs to get it for a Browser-based Linux emulator.

Maybe Google isnt completely full of shit with a browser based OS after all...

[alien anthropologist]

It can run DOS games...

.. but does it run 'em slow enough?

Now where did I put my copy of Ancient Art of War...