How I put Linux in an HTML file
Recently, I built something that sounds impossible at first: Linux running from a single HTML file.
The trick is that Linux itself is not running directly as a webpage. Instead, I compiled mini-rv32ima (cnlohr’s is awesome, you should go check his work out!) to WebAssembly and then ran it in an HTML file using JavaScript.
mini-rv32ima is a 32-bit RISC-V emulator that is written single-file C header for use. It wouldn’t compile to WebAssembly natively, so I had to make some modifications to the source code.
I had never used Emscripten before, but I managed to get the grasp of it using some AI assistance, and I was able to compile mini-rv32ima to WebAssembly successfully.
Normally, WebAssembly wouldn’t fit without packaging it into the HTML file. However, I wrote a Python script to encode the WebAssembly module into a base64 string and embed it directly in the HTML file. I then embedded the remaining components into the HTML file through another Python script.
The frontend is a simple XTerm.js terminal emulator that allows the user to interact with the Linux kernel running in the WebAssembly module. It is rather slow, I am working on fixing that.
Demo
If you would like to try it out, you can visit the demo page. The username is root` and there is no password.
If you would like to learn more about the project, you can visit the GitHub repository.