Boot a linux kernel right inside your browser.

Unbelievable, this is like magic. I am totally impressed. It is a real linux instance. BTW. I see the hello.c file someone mentioned here. Have we all mounted the same disk image?

I see so many use cases for this, but I don't fully understand what is going on behind the scenes. Maybe someone can shed some light on it:

  1) How is the disk emulated. Is it a local image, or is it running on the backend?

  2) Is there a remote possibility to get the networking up and running?

  3) Can the disk image be externally accessed to be customized?

This is completely awesome. When I saw http://cb.vu a few years ago I thought hey, someone has finally done it, but that turned out to be a hack. Kudos to Bellard once again.

Nitpicking: the terminal emulation is messed up. It keeps resizing horizontally, and less gets confused. I'm sure the terminal emulator was fun to play with. A correct vt100 state machine implementation [1] would probably not be quite as fun [2]. There's a vt100.js library used by a couple projects that might improve things. [3]

[1] http://vt100.net/emu/dec_ansi_parser

[2] http://vt100.net/emu/vt500_parser.png

[3] http://fzort.org/bi/o.php

which company is that?

1): The disk doesn't seem to be emulated; it's just a rootfs in RAM.

2): See another thread here.

3): Check out cpux86.js. In the start() function at the very end, the following section might be enlighting (even though it is a bit obfuscated by a javascript compressor):

  function start() {
  [...]
    If=32*1024*1024;
    ya.phys_mem_resize(If);
    ya.load_binary("vmlinux26.bin",0x00100000);
    Jf=ya.load_binary("root.bin",0x00400000);
    start=0x10000;
    ya.load_binary("linuxstart.bin",start);
    ya.eip=start;

The files vmlinux26.bin, root.bin and linuxstart.bin are fetched from the server.

I'm sad the source has been compressed so there's no easy human-readable View Source, like there was on the VAX emulator that came up a few weeks ago. :( Still awe-inspiring, though. :)