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.
For anyone too lazy to follow two links, here’s the demo: https://joelseverin.github.io/linux-wasm/
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
Still can’t open a local file because of “CORS”
