5 ms·

Jor1k – OpenRISC 1000 Platform Emulator in JS, Launches Linux with X or Wayland

52 points by conductor 13y ago

thomasjames 13y ago
Works especially well in asm.js under Firefox. I can't quite get keyboard input to work well under X, but this is really impressive.
s-macke 13y ago
And again. We had the news about the same emulator one month ago, but without X and Wayland. But of course I like it :) Believe me or not. The hard part was not to write the emulator. The CPU needs less than 1000 lines of code. No, the hard part was to compile all those programs with the toolchain which is still in early development. Just to mention one example, shared Libraries are supported since one year. The other part is the optimization of the emulator. The rules of normal programming don't apply here. In fact the difficult question is how to keep the javascript engine thinking that all variables are integers and not doubles.
callesgg 13y ago
Great for doing somthing a have wanted to do some time now cat /dev/urandom > /dev/sda
- Vbits 13y ago
  What's stopping you from firing up a VM and installing ubuntu?
- malandrew 13y ago
  You want to pipe urandom to the first registered device, why?
qwerta 13y ago
Pretty impressive. Time to start porting debian into webbrowser :-)
irunbackwards 13y ago
RISC architecture is going to change everything.
- chad_oliver 13y ago
  RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) is not a new idea at all, and it already has changed everything. CISC has been dying for decades now, because it's hard to optimize very complex architectures.
  - edvinbesic 13y ago
    It's a quote from the movie Hackers. If you haven't seen it yet, do it! Just don't hope for realism ;)
  - vernie 13y ago
    I predict that the year of desktop Linux will coincide with the death of CISC.
matiasb 13y ago
It works!
heijmans 13y ago
This is very impressive. The code is very readable, even the asm.js based code (which is probably written by hand). You can find the CPU code in js/worker/cpu. On Chrome I get about 30 MIPS while running scummvm. On Firefox I get about 6 MIPS on the standard core and about 40 MIPS on the asm.js core. I must say that I am impressed by Chrome performance on the standard core. However, sometime Chrome drops to about 6 MIPS for no discernible reason. For people like me, who didn't know what OpenRISC is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenRISC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenRISC
- s-macke 13y ago
  Yes, the asm.js code is written by hand. Took around one day. What happened with Firefox I don't know. Firefox 22 was fast (above 30 MIPS) and then it dropped. No chance to find the problem. Chrome sometimes thinks that integers are no longer appropriate for some values and deoptimizes the code. But it seems that the asm.js core is stable and fast for Chrome as well.

52 points by conductor 13y ago

Works especially well in asm.js under Firefox. I can't quite get keyboard input to work well under X, but this is really impressive.

s-macke 13y ago

And again. We had the news about the same emulator one month ago, but without X and Wayland. But of course I like it :) Believe me or not. The hard part was not to write the emulator. The CPU needs less than 1000 lines of code. No, the hard part was to compile all those programs with the toolchain which is still in early development. Just to mention one example, shared Libraries are supported since one year. The other part is the optimization of the emulator. The rules of normal programming don't apply here. In fact the difficult question is how to keep the javascript engine thinking that all variables are integers and not doubles.

callesgg 13y ago

Great for doing somthing a have wanted to do some time now cat /dev/urandom > /dev/sda

Vbits 13y ago
What's stopping you from firing up a VM and installing ubuntu?
malandrew 13y ago
You want to pipe urandom to the first registered device, why?

qwerta 13y ago

Pretty impressive. Time to start porting debian into webbrowser :-)

irunbackwards 13y ago

RISC architecture is going to change everything.

chad_oliver 13y ago
RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) is not a new idea at all, and it already has changed everything. CISC has been dying for decades now, because it's hard to optimize very complex architectures.
- edvinbesic 13y ago
  It's a quote from the movie Hackers. If you haven't seen it yet, do it! Just don't hope for realism ;)
- vernie 13y ago
  I predict that the year of desktop Linux will coincide with the death of CISC.

matiasb 13y ago

It works!

heijmans 13y ago

This is very impressive. The code is very readable, even the asm.js based code (which is probably written by hand). You can find the CPU code in js/worker/cpu. On Chrome I get about 30 MIPS while running scummvm. On Firefox I get about 6 MIPS on the standard core and about 40 MIPS on the asm.js core. I must say that I am impressed by Chrome performance on the standard core. However, sometime Chrome drops to about 6 MIPS for no discernible reason. For people like me, who didn't know what OpenRISC is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenRISC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenRISC

s-macke 13y ago
Yes, the asm.js code is written by hand. Took around one day. What happened with Firefox I don't know. Firefox 22 was fast (above 30 MIPS) and then it dropped. No chance to find the problem. Chrome sometimes thinks that integers are no longer appropriate for some values and deoptimizes the code. But it seems that the asm.js core is stable and fast for Chrome as well.