top | item 37286019

Show HN: RISC-V Linux Terminal emulated via WASM

5 points| edubart | 2 years ago |cartesi-machine.surge.sh | reply

Weekend creation: A Linux terminal on top of a RISC-V emulator running in the browser via WebAssembly, powered by the Cartesi Machine. Check cool commands to experiment in the project page https://github.com/edubart/cartesi-wasm-term

5 comments

order
[+] westurner|2 years ago|reply
webvm has [Tailscale] sockets-over-WebSockets for networking: https://github.com/leaningtech/webvm and:

> runs an unmodified Debian distribution including many native development toolchains.

> WebVM is powered by the CheerpX virtualization engine, and enables safe, sandboxed client-side execution of x86 binaries on any browser. CheerpX includes an x86-to-WebAssembly JIT compiler, a virtual block-based file system, and a Linux syscall emulator.

How do CheerpX and Cartesi Machine compare?

[+] edubart|2 years ago|reply
Main differences in emulation context:

- The Cartesi Machine can run any Linux distribution with RISC-V support, it emulates RISC-V ISA, while CheerpX emulates x86. For instance the Cartesi Machine can run Alpine, Ubuntu, Debian, etc.

- The Cartesi Machine performs a full Linux emulation, while CheerpX emulates only Linux syscalls.

- The Cartesi Machine has no JIT, it only interprets RISC-V instructions, so it is expected to be slower than CheerpX.

- The Cartesi Machine is isolated from the external world and this is intentional, so there is no networking support.

- The Cartesi Machine is a deterministic machine, with the possibility to take a snapshot of the whole machine state so it can be resumed later, CheerpX was not designed for this use case.

[+] PaulHoule|2 years ago|reply
Probably about as fast as a real RISC-V machine too.
[+] brucehoult|2 years ago|reply
Three years ago, yes, or $10 ones now. But the current $80-$200 machines with either 1.85 GHz 3-wide OoO (TH1520: Lichee Pi 4A, Beagle "Ahead", others coming...) or even 1.5 GHz 2-wide in-order (JH7110: VisionFive 2, Star64, others coming...) are several times faster, per core.

And you can shortly get that 1.85 GHz 3-wide OoO in a 64 core chip, on single- and dual-socket motherboards (64 or 128 cores), with quad-socket coming soon. I've been using such a machine via ssh since March, customer deliveries will start in a couple of months.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/milkv/milk-v-pioneer