Blinkenlights

This project contains two programs:

blink is a virtual machine that runs statically-compiled 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 (a) rather than being a 4mb binary, Blink only has a ~167kb footprint; and (b) Blink goes 2x faster than Qemu on some benchmarks such as emulating GCC. The tradeoff is Blink doesn't have as many features as Qemu. Blink is a great fit when you want a virtual machine that's extremely small and runs ephemeral programs much faster. For further details on the motivations for this tool, please read https://justine.lol/ape.html.

blinkenlights is a TUI interface that may be used for debugging x86_64-linux programs across platforms. Unlike GDB, Blinkenlights focuses on visualizing program execution. It uses UNICODE IBM Code Page 437 characters to display binary memory panels, which change as you step through your program's assembly code. These memory panels may be scrolled and zoomed using your mouse wheel. Blinkenlights also permits reverse debugging, where scroll wheeling over the assembly display allows the rewinding of execution history.

Getting Started

We regularly test that Blink is able run x86-64-linux binaries on the following platforms:

• Linux (x86, ARM, RISC-V, MIPS, PowerPC, s390x)
• MacOS (x86, ARM)
• FreeBSD
• OpenBSD
• NetBSD
• Cygwin (no JIT on Windows yet)

Blink depends on the following libraries:

• libc (POSIX.1-2017)

Blink can be compiled on UNIX systems that have:

• A C11 compiler (e.g. GCC 4.9.4+)
• Modern GNU Make (i.e. not the one that comes with XCode)

The instructions for compiling Blink are as follows:

$ make -j4
$ o//blink/blink -h
Usage: o//blink/blink [-hjms] PROG [ARGS...]
  -h        help
  -j        disable jit
  -0        to specify argv[0]
  -m        enable memory safety
  -s        print statistics on exit

Here's how you can run a simple hello world program with Blink:

o//blink/blink third_party/cosmo/tinyhello.elf

Blink has a debugger TUI, which works with UTF-8 ANSI terminals. The most important keystrokes in this interface are ? for help, s for step, c for continue, and scroll wheel for reverse debugging.

o//blink/blinkenlights third_party/cosmo/tinyhello.elf

Testing

Blink is tested primarily using precompiled x86 binaries, which are downloaded automatically. You can check how well Blink works on your local platform by running:

make check

To check that Blink works on 11 different hardware $(ARCHITECTURES) (see Makefile), you can run the following command, which will download statically-compiled builds of GCC and Qemu. Since our toolchain binaries are intended for x86-64 Linux, Blink will bootstrap itself locally first, so that it's possible to run these tests on other operating systems and architectures.

make check2
make emulates

Alternative Builds

For maximum performance, use MODE=rel or MODE=opt. Please note the release mode builds will remove all the logging and assertion statements and Blink isn't mature enough for that yet. So extra caution is advised.

make MODE=rel
o/rel/blink/blink -h

For maximum tinyness, use MODE=tiny. This build mode will not only remove logging and assertion statements, but also reduce performance in favor of smaller binary size whenever possible.

make MODE=tiny
strip o/tiny/blink/blink
ls -hal o/tiny/blink/blink

You can hunt down bugs in Blink using the following build modes:

• MODE=asan helps find memory safety bugs
• MODE=tsan helps find threading related bugs
• MODE=ubsan to find violations of the C standard
• MODE=msan helps find uninitialized memory errors

Compiling and Running Programs under Blink

Blink is picky about which Linux executables it'll emulate. For example, right now only static binaries are supported. In other cases, the host system page size may cause problems. For example, Apple M1 has a system page size of 16kb, and WASM's page size is 64kb. On those platforms, you may encounter an error like this:

I2023-01-06T18:12:51.007788:blink/loader.c:91:47550 p_vaddr p_offset skew unequal w.r.t. host page size

In this case, you can disable the linear memory optimization (using the -m flag) but that'll slow down performance. Another option is simply recompiling your executable so that its ELF program headers will work on systems with a larger page size. You can do that using these GCC flags:

gcc -static -Wl,-z,common-page-size=65536,-z,max-page-size=65536 ...

However that's just step one. The program also needs to be using APIs like sysconf(_SC_PAGESIZE) which will return the true host page size, rather than naively assuming it's 4096 bytes. Your C library gets this information from Blink via getauxval(AT_PAGESZ).

If you're using the Blinkenlights debugger TUI, then another important set of flags to use are the following:

• -fno-omit-frame-pointer
• -mno-omit-leaf-frame-pointer

By default, GCC and Clang use the %rbp backtrace pointer as a general purpose register, and as such, Blinkenlights won't be able to display a frames panel visualizing your call stack. Using those flags solves that. However it's tricky sometimes to correctly specify them in a complex build environment, where other optimization flags might subsequently turn them back off again.

The trick we recommend using for compiling your programs, is to create a shell script that wraps your compiler command, and then use the script in your $CC environment variable. The script should look something like the following:

#!/bin/sh
exec cc \
  -g \
  -Os \
  -no-pie \
  -fno-pie \
  -static \
  "$@" \
  -U_FORTIFY_SOURCE \
  -fno-stack-protector \
  -fno-omit-frame-pointer \
  -mno-omit-leaf-frame-pointer \
  -Wl,-z,common-page-size=65536 \
  -Wl,-z,max-page-size=65536

Those flags will go a long way towards helping your Linux binaries be (1) capable of running under Blink on all of its supported operating systems and microprocessor architectures, and (2) trading away some of the modern security blankets in the interest of making the assembly panel more readable, and less likely to be picky about memory.

If you're a Cosmopolitan Libc user, then Cosmopolitan already provides such a script, which is the cosmocc and cosmoc++ toolchain. Please note that Cosmopolitan Libc uses a 64kb page size so it isn't impacted by many of these issues that Glibc and Musl users may experience.

• cosmopolitan/tool/scripts/cosmocc
• cosmopolitan/tool/scripts/cosmoc++

If you're not a C / C++ developer, and you prefer to use high-level languages instead, then one program you might consider emulating is Actually Portable Python, which is an APE build of the CPython v3.6 interpreter. It can be built from source, and then used as follows:

git clone https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/
cd cosmopolitan
make -j8 o//third_party/python/python.com
blinkenlights -jm o//third_party/python/python.com

The -jm flags are helpful here, since they ask the Blinkenlights TUI to enable JIT and the linear memory optimization. It's helpful to have those flags because Python is a very complicated and compute intensive program, that would otherwise move too slowly under the Blinkenlights vizualization. You may also want to press the CTRL-T (TURBO) key a few times, to make Python emulate in the TUI even faster.

Some other programs you can try, are SQLite and Antirez's Kilo editor.

git clone https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/
cd cosmopolitan
make -j8 o//third_party/sqlite3/sqlite3.com
blinkenlights -jm o//third_party/sqlite3/sqlite3.com
make -j8 o//examples/kilo.com
blinkenlights -jm o//examples/kilo.com

For further details, please read Getting Started with Cosmopolitan Libc which is a blog post explaining how you can write your own programs in the cosmopolitan mono-repo, which naturally will be guaranteed to work really well under Blink and Blinkenlights.

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.

The prime directive of this project is to act as a virtual machine for userspace binaries compiled by Cosmopolitan Libc. However we've also had success virtualizing programs compiled with Glibc and Musl Libc, such as GCC and Qemu. Blink supports 130+ Linux system call ABIs, including fork() and clone(). Linux system calls may only be used by long mode programs via the SYSCALL instruction, as it is written in the System V ABI.

Instruction Sets

The following hardware ISAs are supported by Blink.

• i8086
• i386
• X87
• SSE2
• x86_64
• SSE3
• SSSE3
• CLMUL
• POPCNT
• ADX
• BMI2
• RDRND
• RDSEED
• RDTSCP

Programs may use CPUID to confirm the presence or absence of optional instruction sets. Please note that Blink does not follow the same monotonic progress as Intel's hardware. For example, BMI2 is supported; this is an AVX2-encoded (VEX) instruction set, which Blink is able to decode, even though the AVX2 ISA isn't supported. Therefore it's important to not glob ISAs into "levels" (as Windows software tends to do) where it's assumed that BMI2 support implies AVX2 support; because with Blink that currently isn't the case.

On the other hand, Blink does share Windows' x87 behavior w.r.t. double (rather than long double) precision. It's not possible to use 80-bit floating point precision with Blink, because Blink simply passes along floating point operations to the host architecture, and very few architectures support long double precision. You can still use x87 with 80-bit words. Blink will just store 64-bit floating point values inside them, and that's a legal configuration according to the x87 FPU control word. If possible, it's recommended that long double simply be avoided. If 64-bit floating point is good enough for the rocket scientists at NASA then it should be good enough for everybody. There are some peculiar differences in behavior with double across architectures (which Blink currently does nothing to address) but they tend to be comparatively minor, e.g. an op returning NAN instead of -NAN.

Blink has reasonably comprehensive coverage of the baseline ISAs, including even support for BCD operations (even in long mode!) But there are some truly fringe instructions Blink hasn't implemented, such as BOUND and ENTER. Most of the unsupported instructions, are usually ring-0 system instructions, since Blink is primarily a user-mode VM, and therefore only has limited support for bare metal operating system software (which we'll discuss more in-depth in a later section).

Blink itself may be detected via CPUID by checking for the vendor string GenuineBlink (rather than the GenuineIntel / AuthenticAMD brands that get reported normally). Please note that old versions of Blinkenlights use the brand GenuineCosmo. Blink also identifies itself as blink 4.0 via the uname() system call. We report a false version because otherwise, every program that links Glibc will refuse to run.

JIT

Blink uses just-in-time compilation, which is supported on x86_64 and aarch64. Blink takes the appropriate steps to work around restrictions relating to JIT, on platforms like Apple and OpenBSD. We generate JIT code using a printf-style domain-specific language. The JIT works by generating functions at runtime which call the micro-op functions the compiler created. To make micro-operations go faster, Blink determines the byte length of the compiled function at runtime by scanning for a RET instruction. Blink will then copy the compiled function into the function that the JIT is generating. This works in most cases, however some tools can cause problems. For example, OpenBSD RetGuard inserts static memory relocations into every compiled function, which Blink's JIT currently doesn't understand; so we need to use compiler flags to disable that type of magic. In the event other such magic slips through, Blink has a runtime check which will catch obvious problems, and then gracefully fall back to using a CALL instruction. Since no JIT can be fully perfect on all platforms, the o//blink/blink -j flag may be passed to disable Blink's JIT. Please note that disabling JIT makes Blink go 10x slower. With the o//blink/blinkenlights command, the -j flag takes on the opposite meaning, where it instead enables JIT. This can be useful for troubleshooting the JIT, because the TUI display has a feature that lets JIT path formation be visualized. Blink currently only enables the JIT for programs running in long mode (64-bit) but we may support JITing 16-bit programs in the future.

Virtualization

Blink virtualizes memory using the same PML4T approach as the hardware itself, where memory lookups are indirected through a four-level radix tree. Since performing four separate page table lookups on every memory access can be slow, Blink checks a translation lookaside buffer, which contains the sixteen most recently used page table entries. The PML4T allows all memory lookups in Blink to be "safe" but it still doesn't offer the best possible performance. Therefore, on systems with a huge address space (i.e. petabytes of virtual memory) Blink relies on itself being loaded to a random location, and then identity maps guest memory using a simple linear translation. For example, if the guest virtual address is 0x400000 then the host address might be 0x400000+0x088800000000. This means that each time a memory operation is executed, only a simple addition needs to be performed. This goes extremely fast, however it may present issues for programs that use MAP_FIXED. Some systems, such as modern Raspberry Pi, actually have a larger address space than x86-64, which lets Blink offer the guest the complete address space. However on some platforms, like 32-bit ones, only a limited number of identity mappings are possible. There's also compiler tools like TSAN which lay claim to much of the fixed address space. Blink's solution is designed to meet the needs of Cosmopolitan Libc, while working around Apple's restriction on 32-bit addresses, and still remain fully compatible with ASAN's restrictions. In the event that this translation scheme doesn't work on your system, the blink -m flag may be passed to disable the linear translation optimization, and instead use only the memory safe full virtualization approach of the PML4T and TLB.

Blink has an xterm-compatible ANSI teletypewriter display implementation which allows Blink's TUI interface to host other TUI programs, within an embedded terminal display. For example, it's possible to use Antirez's Kilo text editor inside Blink's TUI.

Blink supports 16-bit BIOS programs, such as SectorLISP. To boot real mode programs in Blink, the o//blink/blinkenlights -r flag may be passed, which puts the virtual machine in i8086 mode. Currently only a limited set of BIOS APIs are available. For example, Blink supports IBM PC Serial UART, CGA display, and the MDA display APIs which are rendered using block characters in the TUI interface. We hope to expand our real mode support in the near future, in order to run operating systems like ELKS.

Blink supports troubleshooting operating system bootloaders. Blink was designed for Cosmopolitan Libc, which embeds an operating system in each binary it compiles. Blink has helped us debug our bare metal support, since Blink is capable of running in the 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit modes a bootloader requires at various stages. In order to do that, we needed to implement some ring0 hardware instructions. Blink has enough to support Cosmopolitan, but it'll take much more time to get Blink to a point where it can boot something like Windows.

Blink supports several different executable formats, all of which are static. You can run:

• Actually Portable Executables, which have either the MZqFpD or jartsr magic.

• Statically-compiled x86-64-linux ELF executables, so long as they don't use PIC/PIE or require a interpreter.

• Flat executables, which must end with the file extension .bin. In this case, you can make executables as small as 10 bytes in size, since they're treated as raw x86-64 code. Blink always loads flat executables to the address 0x400000 and automatically appends 16mb of BSS memory.

• Real mode executables, which are loaded to the address 0x7c00. These programs must be run using the blinkenlights command with the -r flag.