Micro Core on Javascript PC Emulator

[danielibarnes]

Description:
Micro Core ported to the Javascript PC Emulator by Fabrice Bellard.

Link:
http://daniel.koolserve.com/jslinux/

Sources:
http://daniel.koolserve.com/src/

This is primarily a proof-of-concept. Includes the screen extension and dependencies. It also compiles a small C program on bootup in /home/tc.

[Lee]

That's "kool", but holy mackerel Is it ever slow! (on a six year old Dell Dimension w/dual core CPU and 512MB)

I just logged in as tc w/no password.  What will it do next?  And when? 

Never mind - there's the prompt...

... Ok, that was neat.  Not terribly useful, but neat.  Running it with some pretty conky graphs along side illuminates the nature of the slowness - it maxes out the CPU -and- gets into using swap.  It does let the CPU go idle upon shutdown of the vm, but doesn't seem to free up the memory - that's probably Firefox holding on to the memory though.

[Rich]

That http://daniel.koolserve.com/jslinux/ link brought my machine to it's knees. Opera memory usage
shot up to 85% and it's CPU usage went to 92%. Took a few minutes to get the tab closed and regain
control of my computer.

[gutmensch]

@daniel: nice work! when I read about jslinux a few weeks ago I already wondered, when someone will try to bring tc to it

@rich: better use a browser with good js performance... until opera 11 I think it was not even close to ff4/chrome

[danielibarnes]

If anyone has any ideas, please post! That is one of the primary reasons for my releasing this.

Firefox 4 seems to have best performance. It runs reasonably fast for me, but I have a dual E5520 @ 2.26GHz w/4GB. I have another version of the page where I added a second serial port and use it to send data to/from the Javascript. That was cool.

There are a few things missing:

• No framebuffer. You think it's slow now? Try adding graphics.
• No virtual network adapter. Would take some work, but possible.
• No persistent storage. This is important to me, as I'd like to create hands-on Tiny Core Tutorials.

Not terribly useful yet, but I am working on it. I added screen to give it a little more usefulness.

[Lee]

FYI: My experience, mentioned above, was with Minefield 3.0.4.