Run a Linux binary under emulation

[alexis-jaksone]

I was wondering if this is doable to run an x86 Linux binary directly using v86. Somthing like qemu-i386 or box86.

[copy]

It's technically possible, but would be quite a bit of work. I would gladly provide some pointers or review a pull request, but I don't have time to work on something big at the moment.

[alexis-jaksone]

That would be great to have some pointers

[copy]

Sure!

• This is the entry point for legacy system calls (int 0x80), and page faults, general protection error, etc. The latter you'll need to turn into signals. Here is the modern syscall instruction. You can just change the code and implement system calls in place for now, and we'll later figure out how to factorise the code to implement either hardware emulation or Linux syscalls.
• For mmap/brk you probably want to use regular paging since that's what v86 implements efficiently (wasm doesn't have mmap anyway). Just initialise cr0 and cr3 like on a real OS.
• There's a crude elf parser in src/elf.js that you can use as a starting point. I'd recommend starting with static executables and see if some changes in the elf parser or loader are necessary (most likely yes).