Linux on a simulated RISC-V chip in a graphics card fragment shader! #RISCV #Linux #Emulation

On the VRChat world developer community meetup on Sunday the 15th, user _pi_ showed off a spectacular capability:

Linux running on a graphics card shader!

Modern graphics cards are composed of varying numbers of computing units, usually for specific tasks like image shading, texture mapping, etc. They are very difficult to program as general purpose computing blocks, but this demonstrates it can be done.

The fragment shader emulates a RISC-V CPU. It runs Linux, and _pi_ has ported MicroPython to the processor also!

The power is described as comparable to a modern microcontroller but this was with VR also running (the entire demo was in VR with VR controls of the processor!)

See the full demonstration in the VRChat recording below (YouTube) – it starts at timecode 1:26:00 and more on the Twitter thread here.