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Crazierl – An Erlang Operating System

Crazierl – An Erlang Operating System

by toast0·Mar 29, 2026·72 points·14 comments

AI Analysis

●●SolidWizardryNiche Gem

Erlang OS nodes clustering directly inside your browser via v86 emulation.

Strengths
  • v86 browser emulation allows instant demo without requiring local installation.
  • BEAM distribution clustering over websockets is a technically novel approach.
  • Explicit security warnings about unencrypted dist build trust with users.
Weaknesses
  • Explicitly hobby-grade software that crashes with high core counts.
  • Legacy VGA feature dependencies break compatibility on modern hardware.
Target Audience

Erlang developers and OS hobbyists

Similar To

v86 · Erlang/OTP · JSLinux

Post Description

Crazierl is an experimental/hobby operating system based around BEAM.

I've linked the browser based demo; I don’t recommend using a phone; it does work, slowly, on the phones I tested, but it’s very awkward to use. You can share a link with a hashtag with your friends and click the consent checkbox, and it (should) link up into dist and I’ve also included a chat application you can start with chat:start(). (quit chat with /quit, or use the shell menu with ctrl-g to switch between shells etc).

The browser demo relies on the v86 javascript x86 virtual machine. You can also run Crazierl on a real x86 system, but I’ve had mixed luck on modern systems, it uses some esoteric legacy VGA features and support for that isn’t getting better.

Crazierl is fairly limited: 32-bit x86, BIOS boot, only two NIC drivers virtio-net and realtek 8168. But it's got enough to become part of an Erlang dist cluster. It also supports SMP, but it’s crashy with high core counts in qemu; there’s almost certainly several concurrency bugs in the kernel. There's also a lot of excess tcp debug spew (sorry).

Source code is available (Apache) https://github.com/russor/crazierl/

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