A high school student named Allen has successfully created a 32-bit RISC-V Linux buildroot environment that boots inside a PDF document. By compiling the TinyEMU emulator into JavaScript, he leveraged the capabilities of PDF viewers to run this limited Linux distribution. Despite its novelty, the performance is notably slow—the kernel takes up to a minute to boot. The project, dubbed LinuxPDF, requires a Chromium-based browser and utilizes a software keyboard for input. Allen's efforts also echo a prior project where he achieved running Doom in a PDF.
The person who managed the achievement also created DoomPDF, which The Register reported last month.
Allen wrote, "The full specification for the JS in PDFs was only ever implemented by Adobe Acrobat, and it contains some ridiculous things like the ability to do 3D rendering, make HTTP requests, and detect every monitor connected to the user's system."
...performance isn't great. It takes the Linux kernel up to a minute to boot inside a PDF, which is 100 times slower than normal.
LinuxPDF includes a full software keyboard and an optional text field for typing complex commands.
Collection
[
|
...
]