News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Jor1k – OpenRISC 1000 Platform Emulator in JS, Launches L... by s-macke on Tuesday October 15, 2013 @06:06PM (#6556692)
And again. We had the news about the same emulator one month ago, but without X and Wayland. But of course I like it :) Believe me or not. The hard part was not to write the emulator. The CPU needs less than 1000 lines of code. No, the hard part was to compile all those programs with the toolchain which is still in early development. Just to mention one example, shared Libraries are supported since one year.

The other part is the optimization of the emulator. The rules of normal programming don't apply here. In fact the difficult question is how to keep the javascript engine thinking that all variables are integers and not doubles.

Re:Jor1k – OpenRISC 1000 Platform Emulator in JS, Launches L... by thomasjames on Tuesday October 15, 2013 @05:39PM (#6556550)
Works especially well in asm.js under Firefox. I can't quite get keyboard input to work well under X, but this is really impressive.
Re:Jor1k – OpenRISC 1000 Platform Emulator in JS, Launches L... by irunbackwards on Tuesday October 15, 2013 @07:16PM (#6556993)
RISC architecture is going to change everything.
Re:Jor1k – OpenRISC 1000 Platform Emulator in JS, Launches L... by chad_oliver on Tuesday October 15, 2013 @07:41PM (#6557090)
RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) is not a new idea at all, and it already has changed everything. CISC has been dying for decades now, because it's hard to optimize very complex architectures.
Re:Jor1k – OpenRISC 1000 Platform Emulator in JS, Launches L... by edvinbesic on Tuesday October 15, 2013 @07:45PM (#6557117)
It's a quote from the movie Hackers. If you haven't seen it yet, do it! Just don't hope for realism ;)
Re:Jor1k – OpenRISC 1000 Platform Emulator in JS, Launches L... by vernie on Tuesday October 15, 2013 @08:30PM (#6557300)
I predict that the year of desktop Linux will coincide with the death of CISC.
Re:Jor1k – OpenRISC 1000 Platform Emulator in JS, Launches L... by heijmans on Wednesday October 16, 2013 @07:45AM (#6559048)
This is very impressive. The code is very readable, even the asm.js based code (which is probably written by hand). You can find the CPU code in js/worker/cpu.

On Chrome I get about 30 MIPS while running scummvm. On Firefox I get about 6 MIPS on the standard core and about 40 MIPS on the asm.js core.

I must say that I am impressed by Chrome performance on the standard core. However, sometime Chrome drops to about 6 MIPS for no discernible reason.

For people like me, who didn't know what OpenRISC is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenRISC

Re:Jor1k – OpenRISC 1000 Platform Emulator in JS, Launches L... by s-macke on Wednesday October 16, 2013 @01:20PM (#6560859)
Yes, the asm.js code is written by hand. Took around one day. What happened with Firefox I don't know. Firefox 22 was fast (above 30 MIPS) and then it dropped. No chance to find the problem. Chrome sometimes thinks that integers are no longer appropriate for some values and deoptimizes the code. But it seems that the asm.js core is stable and fast for Chrome as well.
Re:Jor1k – OpenRISC 1000 Platform Emulator in JS, Launches L... by qwerta on Tuesday October 15, 2013 @06:44PM (#6556864)
Pretty impressive. Time to start porting debian into webbrowser :-)
Re:Jor1k – OpenRISC 1000 Platform Emulator in JS, Launches L... by callesgg on Tuesday October 15, 2013 @06:13PM (#6556735)
Great for doing somthing a have wanted to do some time now

cat /dev/urandom > /dev/sda

Re:Jor1k – OpenRISC 1000 Platform Emulator in JS, Launches L... by Vbits on Tuesday October 15, 2013 @07:42PM (#6557099)
What's stopping you from firing up a VM and installing ubuntu?
Re:Jor1k – OpenRISC 1000 Platform Emulator in JS, Launches L... by malandrew on Wednesday October 16, 2013 @12:57AM (#6558082)
You want to pipe urandom to the first registered device, why?
Re:Jor1k – OpenRISC 1000 Platform Emulator in JS, Launches L... by matiasb on Wednesday October 16, 2013 @12:18AM (#6557984)
It works!