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

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.

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.

RISC architecture is going to change everything.

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

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

Great for doing somthing a have wanted to do some time now

cat /dev/urandom > /dev/sda

It works!