webvm VS container2wasm

Shameless self-promotion: https://webvm.io

Powered by a x86->Wasm JIT. Technical writeup: https://labs.leaningtech.com/blog/webvm-server-less-x86-virt...

Developer here. CheerpX for Flash runs the Pepper API version of Flash, and you're correct about the license. However, we don't do full Linux emulation just to run Flash - we emulate PPAPI and run the Flash player in an x86 JIT (CheerpX).

Yuri talks about CXFF's architecture here:

https://youtu.be/7JUs4c99-mo?t=1045

...but if you wanted full Linux system emulation, we got it! https://webvm.io

webvm has Tailscale sockets-over-WebSockets for networking: https://github.com/leaningtech/webvm

https://webvm.io/ supports WebVM runs x86 binaries in WASM on any browser w/ ("CheerpX includes an x86-to-WebAssembly JIT compiler, a virtual block-based file system, and a Linux syscall emulator") and for external sockets there's Tailscale networking.

IIUC that means an SSH client in a WebVM can connect to a (tailscale (wg)) VPN mesh

lets pre-load it into a https://github.com/leaningtech/webvm/blob/main/dockerfiles/debian_mini

Just to show how complex these can get look at this https://webvm.io/

Funnily enough, I believe that's completely achievable with enough time spent on it (probably a few weeks of an engineer working full time).

We have technology like WebVM [1] (from leaningtech / CheerP) or Copy86 [2] that already allows x86 machine code execution/emulation on the web. If you add an OCI client layer on top that is executable in the browser, it should be possible to run Docker containers in the browser.

[1] https://webvm.io/

[2] https://copy.sh/v86/

Unfortunately cosmopolitan wouldn't work for dockerc. Cosmopolitan works as long as you only use it but container runtimes require additional features. Also containers contain arbitrary executables so not sure how that would work either...

As for WASM, this is already possible using container2wasm[0] and wasmer[1]'s ability to generate static binaries.

[0]: https://github.com/ktock/container2wasm

[1]: https://wasmer.io/

Really impressed by the depth and breadth of this project, well done!

A particularly interesting part is the socket layer inside the browser. Other people solving this problem have previously used a proxy to a server that does the real socket implementation. This means you can't have a "browser-only" solution.

The author has solved this (for HTTP/S only) by proxying HTTP requests and then re-creating them as fetch requests (details here: https://github.com/ktock/container2wasm/tree/main/examples/n...). I'm very interested in using this approach for my own project Runno (https://runno.dev).