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WebVM: Server-less x86 virtual machines in the browser

352 points| AshleysBrain | 4 years ago |leaningtech.com | reply

105 comments

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[+] williamstein|4 years ago|reply
The JIT compilation to WebAssembly they are doing with WebVM is pretty cool!

I didn't see any benchmarks on the linked to page. I tried their sample Fibonacci program, but up to 100000 and ONLY timing actual execution (using the time Python module) to not include startup time, and WebVM only took 6.7 times as long as native for me. That's very impressive.

There's a similar open source project called https://copy.sh/v86/. Using their arch Linux image with the exact same Fibonacci benchmark, it take 44 times as long as native.

[+] Recursing|4 years ago|reply
As a smoke test, I tried running `time python3 -c 'print(max(range(2*10**7)))'`

It's about ~10x faster on webvm.io compared to copy.sh/v86 and only ~20x slower than native, impressive stuff

[+] syrusakbary|4 years ago|reply
Thinking more about this.

I'd love to try v8 there, so we can benchmark the WebVM v8 against the Native JS in the browser... all using the same engine (is a bit meta, isn't it?)

[+] benou|4 years ago|reply
I timed a very simple loop in C: "for (volatile int i=0; i<N; i++);" (handful of arithmetic, compare and branch instructions) with N=1e9 and it was 70% the speed of native which looks really good. I'd love to see LINPACK now :)
[+] syrusakbary|4 years ago|reply
Thanks for the benchmarks! I was curious about timing.

Python is also a bit tricky because it does things with pointers that I believe are hard to optimize (or maybe not, who knows!). Have you tried other languages/programs?

[+] westurner|4 years ago|reply
Is WebVM a potential solution to "JupyterLite doesn't have a bash/zsh shell"? The current pyodide CPython Jupyter kernel takes like ~25s to start at present, and can load Python packages precompiled to WASM or unmodified Python packages with micropip: https://pyodide.org/en/latest/usage/loading-packages.html#lo...

Does WebVM solve for workload transparency, CPU overutilization by one tab, or end-to-end code signing maybe with W3C ld-proofs and whichever future-proof signature algorithm with a URL?

[+] miohtama|4 years ago|reply
The VM cannot have full TCP/IP stack, so any data research tasks are likely to need a special code paths and support for downloads. No SQL databases, etc.
[+] mahoro|4 years ago|reply
Wow, this is amazing!

Now we could create a /dev/dom virtual device, and write dynamic web pages in pure bash. I love this.

[+] colejohnson66|4 years ago|reply
Or a DOMFS in /dom that's organized in the same hierarchy as the browser DOM. For example, to write a whole page:

    echo "...." > /dom
Update the <title> tag:

    echo "TITLE" > /dom/html/head/title
Change the charset:

    echo "EBCDIC" > /dom/html/head/meta[1].charset // second <meta> tag
    echo "EBCDIC" > /dom/html/head/1.charset       // second child of <head>
Even go full XPath and replace a tag's inner HTML:

    echo "<div>abc</div>" > /dom/[@id='myID']
This is a horrible idea...
[+] syrusakbary|4 years ago|reply
This is awesome. Really. Props to all the Leaning Tech team (creators of Cheerp, an alternative to Emscripten)!

I believe it will be possible to achieve similar state in the future just using Native Wasm/WASI (so no transpilation from x86 -> Wasm will be needed), but we are far from it given how slow the WASI standards move.

The shell is impressive: https://webvm.io/ (only downloads ~5Mb of resources for a full Debian distro)

[+] iFire|4 years ago|reply
License check without commentary.

> Copyright (c) Leaning Technologies Limited. All rights reserved.

https://github.com/leaningtech/webvm/commit/6efab7e60bf6f173...

[+] parksy|4 years ago|reply
The repo doesn't contain the actual distro itself, it appears to be loading CheerPX's virtualisation engine and feeding it a disk image here https://github.com/leaningtech/webvm/blob/6efab7e60bf6f173a2...

Assuming they wrote their own xterm interface (no idea if they did, I got as far as that), seems everything open-source is fetched by the client at runtime. This feels to me more like a bootloader than an OS. Not sure where that lands it license-wise whether merely linking to the image requires appropriate licensing and attribution but either way the work seems pretty straightforward to replicate assuming you have / can supply an xterminal-esque interface and can compile your OS image appropriately.

I don't think they're doing anything wrong licensing-wise but I guess it depends on how the law defines including software as a library, whether that needs to happen at compile time or run time, or whatever. Seems like a grey area?

[+] apignotti|4 years ago|reply
Hello HN, author of the post here, happy to answer questions.
[+] Klasiaster|4 years ago|reply
So, this is a reimplementation of the Linux ABI and no Linux kernel source is involved, right?
[+] arturventura|4 years ago|reply
Hey dude, I've been screwing around implementing plan9 semantics in a OS like system for the browser (https://github.com/intigos/possimpible). I'm interested in using a x86 emulator inside a webwoker that I'm using for processes so I can run x86 code. How hard is something like this? Can you give me some pointers on how to start working on this? Thanks!
[+] btdmaster|4 years ago|reply
It seems to not work with my eager block settings. It works with a fresh Firefox profile though, so it's not clear what the issue exactly is though. I know for sure that the ext2 is never actually downloaded (0 byte response) and when I try to check anything in DevTools cxcore.wasm triggers a pause on debugger statement, which spikes the CPU.

Any chance there could be a version with all the assets in one thing (say, GitHub Pages)?

[+] easrng|4 years ago|reply
Is there support for loopback networking (for IPC)? Is there a way to translate HTTP(S) requests to `fetch` requests? How difficult would it be to port a Go app that uses https://github.com/pion/webrtc to use the browser's native WebRTC?
[+] bonzini|4 years ago|reply
What performance bottlenecks are there that can still be improved?

Right now I see a ~6x slowdown on small-code benchmarks like sieve, but it goes up to 50x or more for large code like GCC. For QEMU it's roughly 1.6x and 2-3x respectively, so it seems like your JIT is slower than QEMU's.

[+] PeterisP|4 years ago|reply
Is this tech a reasonable way for cross-platform emulation, e.g. a x86 VM running on a browser on ARM hardware like the new Apple chips?

In essence, for this approach, would the x86-on-x86 performance hit be similar or very different than the x86-on-ARM performance hit?

[+] xmly|4 years ago|reply
How about the network stack? Is the VM can talk with other VMs from other browsers.
[+] remisharrock|4 years ago|reply
Will you open source your code one day and if no, why not?
[+] thekozmo|4 years ago|reply
Impressive stuff! Worth to try to run the OSv unikernel (one of my babies) in it.
[+] habitue|4 years ago|reply
Can you run containers in webvm?
[+] neurostimulant|4 years ago|reply
> HTTP servers (microservices): By combining Service Workers with virtualized TCP sockets, we will allow HTTP servers inside the WebVM to be reachable from the browser itself. A JavaScript API will be exposed allowing to connect an iframe to the internal servers. This is mostly supported already, although not exposed on the current demo page. A similar solution could be used to support REST microservices as well since Service Workers also handle fetch/XHR requests.

I wonder if this can be used to create a semi-decentralized website where visitors automatically served a vm to run, turning them into an edge server to offload requests from other visitors. The more active visitors, the more edge servers you have. Infinite scaling on the cheap! The visitors may not like you abusing their browser though, but there might be use case where this is acceptable, such as popular community run websites that too expensive to run due to huge amount of traffic.

[+] raggi|4 years ago|reply
`su` sends the vm into a spin on a single core, is it going to get somewhere?

Is there anywhere that documents the covered/uncovered syscall surface?

[+] zekrioca|4 years ago|reply
Yeah, happened to me as well..
[+] didip|4 years ago|reply
I always wonder if someone will eventually put Docker container up on the browser. It will make tons of experimentation work easy.
[+] mrtesthah|4 years ago|reply
is this some kind of joke to make computing as slow as possible?
[+] indigodaddy|4 years ago|reply
This would actually be super useful on Chromebook just as an alternative ssh client as I’m not super happy with existing ssh client solutions on Chromebook— especially that chrome ssh extension thingy which sucks pretty hard imo.

Note I don’t like to put my Chromebooks in developer mode or do the crouton stuff or whatever the latest is on that front..

EDIT, nm it has no tcp stack or outbound connectivity

[+] xiphias2|4 years ago|reply
This looks awesome.

Would it be possible to compile GNU/Linux to WASM as a target platform? What's missing for that?

[+] s5806533|4 years ago|reply
Truly an impressive feat, and a lot of work no doubt. But why? Recently it seems to be some kind of fad to demonstrate that everything can be done inside a web browser. Again: why? Scope creep of web browsers is already beyond repair.
[+] remisharrock|4 years ago|reply
For educational uses, I have plenty of use cases for large scale teaching and learning, without backend servers and without installing anything complex on the client side.
[+] dnautics|4 years ago|reply
we are well on the way towards the death of yavascript, let's hope there the exclusion zone doesn't come true.
[+] 0x138d5|4 years ago|reply
The 5 year war seems mighty close though. One or two parallel universes away maybe.
[+] _57jb|4 years ago|reply
Gotta love the term serverless...on par with fullstack developer.

It's either a server somewhere handling tasks in a queue or the client is the server. I hate that we have to care so much about "words" but I've seen far too many walking away with an impression that the server is unimportant or requires little maintenance in this model. I'd argue it becomes even more important because of how persistence, consensus, availability, etc works /rant

That being said, always excited to see work coming out of webassembly. Network is the computer

[+] suifbwish|4 years ago|reply
Wouldn’t this mean you can host a website in the browser if you run dynamic DNS to connect back to a webserver you have running in the vm on localhost?
[+] endisneigh|4 years ago|reply
What needs to happen to enable the browser to act as a functioning web server?
[+] AshleysBrain|4 years ago|reply
It's not really a server but you can do some interesting stuff with intercepting fetches in Service Workers, e.g. https://servefolder.dev - a little side project of mine.
[+] apignotti|4 years ago|reply
It depends on the definition of "functioning".

If you'd like to access a server from another tab / iframe of the same browser, that's almost possible already, just some UX work would be required.

If you'd like users of the same page (or a separate specialized page) to connect, that could be possible with WebRTC.

If you'd like arbitrary hosts to connect, that would require a server side proxy, there is no client-side only solution that I can see,

[+] anonymousiam|4 years ago|reply
Played with it for a minute or two. No network permissions. No sudo. There is a su, but it hangs after entering a password.

So probably good for unprivileged non-networking applications.

[+] 5ESS|4 years ago|reply
Not working on iPhone or iMac M1… not impressed by that..