Building the worst Linux PC ever: 6 hours to boot Ubuntu
These crazy projects are the most fun. As Richard Feynman notoriously said: "What I cannot create, I do not understand".<p>shameless plug below:<p>Last year, inspired by Bellard's jslinux, I too wrote an emulator that can run Linux on the browser. Only I was lazy and emulated the vastly easier LatticeMico32 processor.<p>Anyways, the result was very intellectually satisfying.<p>After writing the interpreter, I went ahead and wrote a version that generates Javascript code on the fly (and captures up to 3 backwards jumps to the same block), for massive speed ups.<p>Anyways, it doesn't serve any purposes, but boy was it fun...<p>The code is at:
<a href="https://github.com/ubercomp/jslm32/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ubercomp/jslm32/</a><p>And there's a demo running on:
<a href="http://www.ubercomp.com/jslm32/src/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ubercomp.com/jslm32/src/</a><p>BEWARE: It only works well on Chrome (takes download time + 10s to boot on my machine).<p>If anyone is interested in this stuff, just ask and I'll write a post describing what I did to take boot time from 2.5 minutes to 10 seconds.