UEFI Bindings for JavaScript

https://codeberg.org/smnx/promethee

by ananas-dev • 5 months ago

259 106 5 months ago

codeberg.org

edward28• 5 months ago

Wow, this is cursed.

monax10• 5 months ago

I think r/unixporn will love it once it gets DOM support :^)

kijin• 5 months ago

Finally, we can create splash screen animations in pure CSS!

lnenad• 5 months ago

I think the proper term is blursed.

madduci2• 5 months ago

But why?

monax10• 5 months ago

It's just a silly experiment; the real endgame is to make a bootloader that is customisable using HTML/CSS/JS

magicalhippo• 5 months ago

Since PDFs can contain JS, presumably that should be the preferred way of modifying your boot loader.

ThrowawayTestr• 5 months ago

Why not?

madduci2• 5 months ago

Because this can end very badly. It is a new surface to attack

g051051• 5 months ago

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

Pretty neat, though.

fbnszb• 5 months ago

Yeah, but your [developers] were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

redvulps• 5 months ago

next step is to create a UEFI TUI using react (please don't)

monax10• 5 months ago

OMG we can use ink for that

aruametello• 5 months ago

you may just have casted a curse on our future motherboards, damn you

tracker13• 5 months ago

Considering how bad some of the Gamer-ish firmware UIs are now, it might be an improvement.

karel-3d• 5 months ago

Just today I have found out there is a CLI TUI framework that uses React.

It's what Claude Code is using.

my_throwaway23• 5 months ago

I presume you'll add the network stack next, so that I can use my favourite, most useful packages?

  import isOdd from "https://unpkg.com/is-odd";

monax10• 5 months ago

We are getting isOdd in the bootloader before GTA-IV

spiffyk• 5 months ago

Wait, when did I time-travel?

p_l• 5 months ago

Well, there's a network stack already there, including HTTP and HTTPS on newer firmwares.

catapart• 5 months ago

Can someone break this down for me? Looks like it's using... C? to load a js interpreter which bootstraps an API around all UEFI features? Do I have that right?

And, if so, does that mean that once the API has been bootstrapped, one could actually write an OS in js? Or are there other abstractions that would need to be migrated first?

monax10• 5 months ago

Depending on your definition of OS, yeah you could do that :)

nxobject• 5 months ago

Hey, when Apple transitioned from m68k to PowerPC, it took them a hell of a long time to rewrite massive parts of their OS. It's a low bar, though...

DustinBrett• 5 months ago

OS in JS, ok I am interested now...

asveikau5• 5 months ago

And, if so, does that mean that once the API has been bootstrapped, one could actually write an OS in js?

I bet somebody has done that.

https://www.google.com/search?q=os+kernel+in+javascript

Seems like a small number of hobbyists have attempted.

I've heard of people doing this with other high level languages. Basically you need enough low level code to bootstrap a VM. Once you have that, you can make the high level language decide some logic that traditionally would be in C code, like manipulating page tables or whatever.

gwbas1c3• 5 months ago

Automatic Garbage Collection in a kernel probably won't work:

I vaguely remember hearing about someone trying to use .Net in the Windows kernel.

The big problem is garbage collection: If I remember correctly, the fact that "any" operation can fail with an out of memory exception was a huge problem. Another problem was that random pauses for garbage collections in the kernel had major stability issues.

In short, I hope that the js kernel is for amusement and education; otherwise it would need a much more advanced garbage collector then earl 2000's .Net.

leoedin• 5 months ago

You'd need to write an entire hardware abstraction layer to do anything useful. There's projects that do this for microcontrollers - eg MicroPython and Espruino.

tatskaari• 5 months ago

You don't need a JS bootloader to write an OS in JS. The bootloader just drops the machine into some memory address for it to start executing your OS init script. that bit could be a Javascript interpreter. You can't do much with the architecture in Javascript though, because it doesn't allow you to map memory directly to your types (unless there's some ungodly nonesense I'm not aware of) so you'll have to drop into C/asm to e.g. interact with the ports/registers/tables to set up userspace.

Zambyte• 5 months ago

An OS doesn't need to have a user space :)

monocasa• 5 months ago

You should be able to write a meta circular VM in JavaScript that targets bare metal without any C or asm.

hajile• 5 months ago

I'm pretty sure someone already compiled Linux to asm.js a few years ago. As asm.js is/was a subset of JS, you could say it's already been done. In theory, you could continue work from there in JS.

https://medium.com/@retrage/lkl-js-running-linux-kernel-on-j...

bayindirh• 5 months ago

This project will go places. Like every silly project not intended for production. :)

faxmeyourcode• 5 months ago

Love this. An example of complete and total dominion over the machine. Great quote here too lol

Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.

falcor84• 5 months ago

Talking about quotes, I also absolutely loved this note at the end of the readme:

If this makes you grin, you are probably holding the torch.

tosti2• 5 months ago

The next step would be to embed a JavaScript engine in coreboot I guess

Smalltalker-80• 5 months ago

Can't wait for browser support for this... ;-)

monax10• 5 months ago

Soon™

ruined2• 5 months ago

webuefi has already been shipped by google for use on chromebooks. but mozilla and apple irrationally refuse to implement the standard for "security reasons"

tosti2• 5 months ago

You jest but W3C is more or less synonymous with Google nowadays.

outadoc• 5 months ago

I love it.

bwat49• 5 months ago

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should!

fenwick67• 5 months ago

Finally!

lioeters• 5 months ago

Turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. The center cannot hold.. The old prophecy is coming true.

grougnax• 5 months ago

Awesome! Everything will be rewritten in JS

GranPC• 5 months ago

"The Birth and Death of JavaScript" is coming true after all.

marijnz0r• 5 months ago

I was going to post this as well! A direct link to the video: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

rezmason• 5 months ago

It begins!

dfedbeef• 5 months ago

Cursed

ycombinatornews• 5 months ago

If this makes you grin you are probably holding a torch

Hilarious

pwdisswordfishy3• 5 months ago

Does it manage to support floats? I am not sure if those can be safely used in the UEFI environment. (I recall GRUB’s build of Lua being integer-only, and Linux avoiding the use of floating-point arithmetic in kernel mode, but I don’t remember the reason.)

monax10• 5 months ago

Yeah floats works

flopsamjetsam• 5 months ago

Floating point was not supported in the Linux kernel to avoid having to save/restore FP registers.

rafram• 5 months ago

This is incredible.

eqvinox2• 5 months ago

If this makes you grin, you are probably holding the torch.

What if it makes me recoil in horror? screams into the void

fnimick2• 5 months ago

Oh hey, we've reached the "Metal" stage! https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

monax10• 5 months ago

I'm doing my part ∠(‘-‘)

ruined2• 5 months ago

thank u 4 ur serves

kiddico• 5 months ago

Thank you for the reminder to do my yearly viewing of that video lol

epistasis• 5 months ago

Whoa, I haven not been following ASM.js stuff in any detail.

Seeing that Metal replaces kernel/userspace boundaries with VM protections for memory, meaning that system call overhead is eliminated, at the price of ASM/VM overhead.

What a fascinating idea. Kidding on the square...

p0w3n3d• 5 months ago

I don't know if it's only me, but did this guy... Did this guy make a huge mistake?

I think he was trying to bend reality with words. I can see many apps that are running in electron on my laptop, each consuming 300MB+ (e.g. Spotify), while many other apps are written in native Swift for example, especially with the help of AI, giving the best performance possible...

Edit.

And prices of RAM nowadays...

pwdisswordfishy3• 5 months ago

Those apps are not consuming 300MB of RAM because they are written in JS. JS is running on microcontrollers and the James Webb Space Telescope.

They are consuming 300MB of RAM because they are built on Electron and the NPM ecosystem.

arxpoetica• 5 months ago

Interesting to see how many things Gary got wrong.

spijdar• 5 months ago

Funny, I've always found it interesting how "on point" it was...

Granted, yeah, we never (or haven't yet) really transitioned to running "full legacy software" inside the browser, or at least it's not common place. That said, I've seen people compile Wine to wasm, Linux to wasm, and lots of other things to wasm, and run em in a browser. Many of the "fake" demos could be done for real now.

The one aspect that remains thoroughly farcical is an equivalent of Wine for OS X/Cocoa good enough to run a web browser. :-(

[edit] And asm.js kind of died on the vine. Not sure how to feel about that one. Wasm could he described as an evolution of the same idea, but in a lot of ways it's something entirely different.

Decabytes• 5 months ago

I’m always amazed and slightly envious of what programming languages with large developer bases can do. I mean if a language is Turing complete it can do anything, but JavaScript takes this to the extreme.

Mind you I never said anything about quality or performance, obviously doing everything in JavaScript comes with it’s own issues but if you were to say that someone got JavaScript running in the Linux kernel as a POC I wouldn’t even be surprised

vaylian• 5 months ago

Could this be used as a learning tool? Rebooting the computer takes so much more time compared to reloading the browser tab. And you probably can't brick your computer.

sanufar• 5 months ago

This is hilarious lol, it’ll be any day now before we get a full JS kernel. Garbage collection could be an obstacle, but I know there have been some kernels written in Go/Java before

fnimick2• 5 months ago

Who needs to garbage collect? Just leak memory until the system dies! That strategy seems to be good enough for claude code, anyway.

cluckindan2• 5 months ago

If it’s good enough for missile guidance systems, it’s good enough for me.

shepherdjerred• 5 months ago

It could be even better!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_processor

juancn• 5 months ago

This is both so impressive and cursed that I'm not sure how to feel.

shevy-java• 5 months ago

I think there are two philosophies here:

1) JavaScript must stay in the box (aka in the browser).

2) JavaScript as a general purpose programming language.

While I can absolutely understand 1), I have had wanted to access the filesystem via JavaScript, just as I do via ruby or python, for local use only. After I googled for a while, they would say that this is not possible unless one uses npm/node. I think this shows that there are use cases here and the "default" JavaScript, aka 1), does not cover these. I do not like JavaScript, but based on my own use cases, I actually favour 2) far more than 1). So from that point of view, being able to access UEFI can also be useful. So why not.

notpushkin• 5 months ago

I have had wanted to access the filesystem via JavaScript, just as I do via ruby or python

There are some (limited) ways to do so now: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System...

As for (1) vs (2), it’s not really an issue of JavaScript at all. The main question is, do you want to build something that runs in a browser? If you’re building a web app, you’ll have to use the sandboxed APIs (and probably JavaScript). If you don’t care about the runtime, yeah, you can use Node or Bun or Deno (or use another language altogether).

DJBunnies• 5 months ago

Try webkitdirectory file attribute for browser access to the file system.

watermelon0• 5 months ago

You are missing one option:

0) JavaScript must be abolished from the browser

pwdisswordfishy3• 5 months ago

I googled for a while, they would say that this is not possible unless one uses npm/node

Gnome Shell and Firefox/SeaMonkey/Mozilla Application Suite/Netscape 6+ (and Zotero[1]) are implemented on top of SpiderMonkey.

1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46735616>

tracker13• 5 months ago

I've been using Deno a LOT for general shell scripting... it's been pretty nice in general. FWIW, Node, Bun and Deno have FS interfaces in the box, so yes, you can do it without npm modules. Though Deno allows you to directly reference the modules/repos from the script without needing a separate install step, package.json or node_modules directory.

It's also a single, self-updating executable and includes a lot in the box. Including SQLite3.

smetannik• 5 months ago

Cursed, but fun

moffkalast• 5 months ago

boot sector
looks inside
node modules

IshKebab• 5 months ago

Javascript is a horrible choice but I think having a scripting language for this is actually quite a good idea. If only there was a popular scripting language that didn't totally suck balls.

chihuahua• 5 months ago

Paul Graham only uses computers that use Lisp in the same way. But it's so good that he keeps it to himself, it's his competitive advantage.

fennec-posix• 5 months ago

good. god.

javascriptfan69• 5 months ago

Beautiful

iberator• 5 months ago

Finally I will be able to have graphical bootup logo like in The Hackers?

lproven• 5 months ago

Your developers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.

UEFI Bindings for JavaScript

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