The subject I am writing about is the x86 emulator written in pure JavaScript and it works inside the browser.
The author of emulator is Fabrice Bellard also founder of QEMU, FFMPEG, Tiny C Compiler. You can test it from http://bellard.org/jslinux/.
On first glance I though that it’s just little window and seems like Linux terminal which supports basic unix commands. After testing it I saw that all unix commands and all programs inside this machine works as expected.
This is not any simulation nor emulation of linux, it’s really linux inside your browser. How?
As a web site it contains two JavaScript files. One of them is terminal program. Another is the emulation of x86 computer inside your browsers. So, pure javascript code emulates an x86 computer and the it loads real linux kernel image into this computer. Author didn’t write any linux software(vi, grep, ls etc. ) for this machine. Because it’s easy to find everywhere or compile them for x86 and those programs are inside the linux image which loaded into emulated x86 computer.
What will the next step? With little modification it’s possible to load FreeBSD, Solaris and even MS Dos into this machine.
With the help of HTML5 canvas and webGL will be possible to create emulation of graphic card. And with no doubt will be possible to load Windows, Linux X server etc. into this machine.
