blink

blink is a virtual machine for running x86-64-linux programs on different operating systems and hardware architectures. It's designed to do the same thing as the qemu-x86_64 command, except rather than being a 10mb binary, blink only has a ~142kb footprint. For further details on the motivations for this tool, please read https://justine.lol/ape.html.

Caveat Emptor

Welcome everyone from the Hacker News, Lobsters, and Reddit communities! This project is a work in progress. Please don't use this for production yet. If you try this be sure to calibrate your expectations accordingly.

Getting Started

You can compile blink on x86-64 Linux, Darwin, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Apple Silicon, and Raspberry Pi using your operating system's toolchain.

# for all x86-64 platforms
$ build/bootstrap/make.com -j8 o//blink/blink

# for apple m1 arm silicon
$ build/bootstrap/blink-darwin-arm64 build/bootstrap/make.com -j8 o//blink/blink

# for linux raspberry pi
$ build/bootstrap/blink-linux-aarch64 build/bootstrap/make.com -j8 o//blink/blink

# run actually portable executable in virtual machine
$ o//blink/blink third_party/cosmo/hello.com
hello world

# run static elf binary in virtual machine
$ o//blink/blink third_party/cosmo/tinyhello.elf
hello world

There's a terminal interface for debugging:

$ build/bootstrap/make.com -j8 o///blink/tui
$ o//blink/tui -t third_party/cosmo/tinyhello.elf

You can run our test executables to check your local platform build:

$ build/bootstrap/make.com -j8 check

For maximum performance, use MODE=release or MODE=opt.

$ build/bootstrap/make.com MODE=opt -j8 check

For maximum tinyness, use MODE=tiny.

$ build/bootstrap/make.com MODE=tiny -j8 check
$ strip o/tiny/blink/blink
$ ls -hal o/tiny/blink/blink

If you're building your code on an x86-64 Linux machine, then the following command will cross-compile blink for i386, arm, m68k, riscv, mips, s390x. Then it'll launch all the cross-compiled binaries in qemu to ensure the test programs above work on all architectures.

$ build/bootstrap/make.com -j8 emulates
$ o/third_party/qemu/qemu-aarch64 o//aarch64/blink/blink third_party/cosmo/hello.com
hello world

Technical Details

blink is an x86-64 interpreter for POSIX platforms that's written in ANSI C11 that's compatible with C++ compilers. Instruction decoding is done using our trimmed-down version of Intel's disassembler Xed. Like Bochs, Blink doesn't do code generation; the primary focus is having a smaller binary footprint with a readable codebase. However we're still likely to add something like jit in the near future.

The prime directive of this project is to act as a virtual machine for userspace binaries compiled by Cosmopolitan Libc. Much of the surface area of the Linux SYSCALL ABI is supported, including fork() and clone(). The SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, POPCNT, CLMUL, RDTSCP, and RDRND ISAs are supported. x87 currently only supports double (64-bit) precision.

Blink supports 32-bit and 16-bit BIOS programs, plus just enough ring0 instructions to test an operating system bootloader. Plus IBM PC Serial UART, CGA, and MDA. However these legacy features might get sprung into a sister project sometime soon.