Open-source developer Joel Severin today announced his work on porting the Linux kernel to WebAssembly and has successffully gotten the kernel up and running within WASM-capable web browsers.
This WebAssembly port of the Linux kernel is up and running basic programs from a shell within a web browser. But there are stability issues and it didn’t take me long either to trigger crashes for this Linux kernel WASM port when running within Google Chrome.
Neat. I had to think about the purpose of running a kernel in a browser, and couldn’t find any at first, but if we just see wasm as a browserless container environment, then it makes more sense than running a linux kernel in a browser. I could see a minimal linux spinning up specialized kernels in different wasm containers, much like vm’s. Not sure what hardware/software roadblocks exist in a modern wasm container environment tho.
Why not just use docker/k8s then and even be able to control those containers via hypervisor?
Because WASM is a VM in terms of isolation.
Docker is just chroot with marketing (and tooling & ecosystem).
So, the idea of wasm is something that could actually run anywhere, without everything required to prop up a docker/k8s runtime