It also supports Tailscale (or the other way around). If you use SSH from Tailscale Admin it’s actually WebVM you see: https://labs.leaningtech.com/blog/webvm-virtual-machine-with...
Very cool project, and great for many usecases. In absolute performance, I find it about 16x slower than CPU [1], but it'd still be super fast compared to the full Linux GUIs we were using comfortably in the 90s/2000s on slower CPUs. Might work for sandboxing user code as well.
[1]: My utterly naive benchmark completes in 9s - time seq 1 50000000 | wc -l
Sad to see Linux turning into a web app. I thought they'd be smart enough to avoid this sort of trend. Hope they continue to support the desktop version.
Poe's law in full effect.
Unless Linus himself is behind this project, I don't think you have anything to worry about.
I'm waiting for the IPhone app.
May your wish be granted:
This is great in comparison to nothing at all, but honestly it’s quite slow since it emulates a different architecture.
If you’re interested, a-Shell hits a different part of the tradeoff curve where it can run at native speeds and has most of the important built in utilities like ssh, but it’s hard to install additional native software because of iOS restrictions (though python stuff are ok)
And a SPA no less. Pity
Hello again HN. Lead dev of WebVM and CTO of Leaning Technologies here. Happy to answer any question from the community.
I've heard about CheerpJ and your Flash solution too. You guys pump out a lot of pretty sophisticated web middlewares. Supposing people were fully aware of your technology, which application do you think would have the highest yield to be ported to your portfolio of middlewares?
We envision virtualization of corporate internal apps to be of the most interesting markets in the short-medium term. CheerpJ has been very successful in this segment for quite some time already. CheerpX can be seen as an alternative to Citrix, at least for some use cases.
In the longer term we plan to get unmodified Docker containers to work with CheerpX, including exposing REST APIs to the local Web app.
We have also internally speculated about a marketplace-like system to allow immediate conversion of traditional client-side apps to Web apps. This would be intended for the long tail of client software vendors that have not yet adopted Web-first distribution methods.
Previous discussion with 632 points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40940225
Networking over websockets with tailscale is a nice touch.
Remember when the web was just for displaying documents? Yeah, me neither
Doesn't sound very monetizable.
Who needs this in the browser and for what purpose?
This company makes a tool to performantly run Linux code in the web browser and uses it to emulate Flash / Java, among other things. This is a test demo of the tool.
Can I run WebVM inside WebVM?
Note this repository doesn't include source for CheerpX, which is the main component of WebVM.
Yeah, the project is merely an open-source wrapper to promote the underlying proprietary library.
I think its cool but am I the only one that doesn't really think the web is a good platform for this? Like, VM stuff needs to be as close to bare metal as possible to be fast. There's special processor features that make virtualisation work well. It's amazingly efficient now. You can vastly over-allocate your hardware between VMs with good modern virtualisation software because they're so damn efficient that they only utilise CPU and memory when they need it. That means they're not just like allocated 4 GBs if you allocate 4 GB to the VM.
All these little optimisations... just aren't going to work well in a browser. I mean, I can already see that alpine (an extremely lightweight VM that I've had boot instantly with vagrant and other such stuff) is slow here. It's a cool hack. I just prefer things to be practical...
No, a lot of people think this. You just won't find most of them here.
There are better approaches to virtualization when that’s your only goal, but this is on the web, which has value in itself.
/? "webvm" jupyter: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22webvm%22+jupyter
- "Is WebVM a potential solution to "JupyterLite doesn't have a bash/zsh shell"?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30167403#30168491 :
- [ ] "ENH: Terminal and Shell: BusyBox, bash/zsh, git; WebVM," https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite/issues/949
And then now WASM containers in the browser FWIU