The "no modify self" variant of Actually Portable Executable is now
supported on all platforms. If you use `$(APE_NO_MODIFY_SELF)` then
ld.bfd will embed a 4096 byte ELF binary and a 4096 byte Macho file
which are installed on the fly to ${TMPDIR:-/tmp}, which enables us
launch the executable, without needing to copy the whole executable
To prevent it from copying a tiny executable to your temp directory
you need to install the `ape` command (renamed from ape-loader), to
a system path. For example:
# FreeBSD / NetBSD / OpenBSD
make -j8 o//ape/ape
cp o//ape/ape /usr/bin/ape
# Mac OS
# make -j8 o//ape/ape.macho
curl https://justine.lol/ape.macho >/usr/bin/ape
chmod +x /usr/bin/ape
On Linux you can get even more performance with the new binfmt_misc
support which makes launching non-modifying APE binaries as fast as
launching ELF executables. Running the following command:
# Linux
ape/apeinstall.sh
Will copy APE loader to /usr/bin/ape and register with binfmt_misc
Lastly, this change also fixes a really interesting race condition
with OpenBSD thread joining.
You can now build Cosmopolitan with Clang:
make -j8 MODE=llvm
o/llvm/examples/hello.com
The assembler and linker code is now friendly to LLVM too.
So it's not needed to configure Clang to use binutils under
the hood. If you love LLVM then you can now use pure LLVM.
I wanted a tiny scriptable meltdown proof way to run userspace programs
and visualize how program execution impacts memory. It helps to explain
how things like Actually Portable Executable works. It can show you how
the GCC generated code is going about manipulating matrices and more. I
didn't feel fully comfortable with Qemu and Bochs because I'm not smart
enough to understand them. I wanted something like gVisor but with much
stronger levels of assurances. I wanted a single binary that'll run, on
all major operating systems with an embedded GPL barrier ZIP filesystem
that is tiny enough to transpile to JavaScript and run in browsers too.
https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/emulator625.mp4
