blinkenlights now does a pretty good job emulating what happens when
binaries boot from BIOS into long mode. So it's been much easier to
debug the bare metal process and wrinkle out many issues.
This change includes many bug fixes, for the NT polyfills, strings,
memory, boot, and math libraries which were discovered by adding more
tools for recreational programming, such as PC emulation. Lemon has also
been vendored because it works so well at parsing languages.
- Emulator can now test the αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε bootloader
- Whipped up a webserver named redbean. It services 150k requests per
second on a single core. Bundling assets inside zip enables extremely
fast serving for two reasons. The first is that zip central directory
lookups go faster than stat() system calls. The second is that both
zip and gzip content-encoding use DEFLATE, therefore, compressed
responses can be served via the sendfile() system call which does an
in-kernel copy directly from the zip executable structure. Also note
that red bean zip executables can be deployed easily to all platforms,
since these native executables work on Linux, Mac, BSD, and Windows.
- Address sanitizer now works very well
I wanted a tiny scriptable meltdown proof way to run userspace programs
and visualize how program execution impacts memory. It helps to explain
how things like Actually Portable Executable works. It can show you how
the GCC generated code is going about manipulating matrices and more. I
didn't feel fully comfortable with Qemu and Bochs because I'm not smart
enough to understand them. I wanted something like gVisor but with much
stronger levels of assurances. I wanted a single binary that'll run, on
all major operating systems with an embedded GPL barrier ZIP filesystem
that is tiny enough to transpile to JavaScript and run in browsers too.
https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/emulator625.mp4
One of the benefits of implementing system call support from scratch is
that we're able to have embedded zip filesystem support which trickles
into libraries such as stdio, without unportable symbolic interposition.
It's also be great if we could say open("gs://bucket/object", O_RDONLY)
for seamless GCS, similar to Java NIO, but abstracted by the C library.
Justine Tunney
