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

• dcposch 15y ago
  It might be useful for CS education. I have a bit of experience with this as a course helper in the introductory (CS106 series) CS classes at Stanford. I think it could be a very cool platform for assignments in CS107 (where students are introduced to Unix and C programming) or CS110/CS140 (the core OS classes). Instead of ssh-ing into a locked-down cluster computer, students could boot a machine in their browser and get root access. No setup, no configuration. Everyone gets an identical setup, which would be really nice for the people making the assignments. The main thing people would need is a way to save files to a persistent disk. Maybe a filesystem driver could be added that uses HTML5 Local Storage, or talks to a web service running on the class website? Incidentally, students in CS140 are already using Fabrice Bellard's software. You write most of a very simple Unix kernel, testing and running it in QEMU.
  • xilun0 15y ago
    Why would you want to use QEMU for CS140 and an inferior solution for CS107?
• VMG 15y ago
  Off the top of my head, this seems to be one possibility of having something like a persistent development environment. I could fire up vim, the server could store the environment and I could easily write code from every place with a decent browser.