8 ms·

Browsix – A Unix-Like Operating System for the Browser

66 points by tremguy 10y ago

MrQuincle 10y ago
Wow, looks like a big deal. I've been reading through https://github.com/plasma-umass/browsix/blob/master/doc/report.pdf?raw=true https://github.com/plasma-umass/browsix/blob/master/doc/repo... which is a really nice article, but I'd recommend you to tell a bit more on what this level of indirection brings. You mention Bluetooth for example in the beginning which is an example of hardware that is yet not supported from the browser. Applications beyond what can currently be done in a UNIX shell would be good. You already have thought long about it. I feel you can tell us much more about possibilities!!!
- OJFord 10y ago
  > You mention Bluetooth for example in the beginning which > is an example of hardware that is yet not supported from > the browser. In what way? There's Cordova/PhoneGap, W3C Web Bluetooth; JS libraries like noble and bleat.
- tremguy 10y ago
  I'm not the author, sorry. Just spotted this on the Google Summer of Code projects list. Read through the paper too, quite creative stuff. I suppose Bluetooth was just an example as the project is still kind of proof of concept at present.
- nteon 10y ago
  Hi, one of the authors here. Thanks! We have a tech report, that has more details on what we are aiming for here: https://web.cs.umass.edu/publication/details.php?id=2414 https://web.cs.umass.edu/publication/details.php?id=2414 As another example of what we can do with real Unix abstractions in the browser, we have : https://meme.bpowers.net/ https://meme.bpowers.net/ Which runs a standard Go HTTP server in a web worker, and instead of doing XMLHttpRequests to a remote service, can route those requests to the in-browser HTTP server! In this case it is about 10x slower, but I think that is an artifact of the GopherJS compiler I have yet to work out.
jrapdx3 10y ago
Looks interesting but did anyone get the demo to work? Click on the "live demo" link, quite a long delay (few minutes), finally terminal-like display appears with "$" prompt. However entering usual unix commands, ls, cd, etc., gives error: "Error while executing /usr/bin/ls: TypeError: get length method called on incompatible Object", or "/usr/bin/cd: command not found". Running with FF Nightly. Don't know if it's me, FF, or the app. What am I missing?
- timlyo 10y ago
  ls /usr/bin gives me: cp cat cpu-intensive-program curl dot echo exec fork_test go-bench grep head hello hello-socket http-example lat_syscall ls mkdir nice node pipeline-example priority-test rm rmdir sh sha1sum socket-example sort stat tail tee touch wc xargs Doesn't seem to be cd, but ls does work. Chromium on Arch.
  - pdkl95 10y ago
    > Doesn't seem to be cd That's expected: $ lsb_release -i Distributor ID: Gentoo $ ls {,/usr}/bin/cd ls: cannot access /bin/cd: No such file or directory ls: cannot access /usr/bin/cd: No such file or directory $ type cd cd is a shell builtin If it isn't working in this javascript project, maybe it is only faking the Bourne shell (badly)?
- nteon 10y ago
  First, (as silly as it is), 'cd' is not yet implemented, as that is a shell intrinsic. Second, Firefox stable (46) is currently supported, but something has changed in the nightly that breaks us. It should be simple to track down, but in the meantime using almost anything other than FF nightly should work! (Safari, Gnome Web, Chrome{,ium}, IE Edge).
ianai 10y ago
Conceptually, I'm digging it. But what would the use cases look like? (not as a skeptic - as a 'I wonder what this opens up')
- nteon 10y ago
  A number of things - do you have a small microservice that was easier to write as server-side code, but you don't want to worry about scaling it? Run it in-browser without code changes or worrying about jank - the server is run in a Web Worker, and any long running computations can happen concurrently with rending, layout, and input handling. Same with traditional C and C++ applications. Wrapping program invocations or APIs with Emscripten can be a pain, and if you have a couple of programs you want to use together, forget it. Browsix lets you compile the program down to a single js file, provide input as you expect (by sticking files on a filesystem, or providing stdin), and register a handle for stdout + stderr.
  - liotier 10y ago
    I can't decide if you are serious or tongue-in-cheek... I'm worried.
    - nteon 10y ago
      I'm quite serious. What's your concern - that it is unrealistic, or that we should stick with mostly-static, single-threaded web-pages forever?
      - liotier 10y ago
        I feel that the additional layers of indirection are quite costly for the convenience of running programs in a Unix environment inside the browser. I can understand the practicality of that for prototyping, but it seems a bit baroque for a production system. But then, the idea of heaping Javascript monsters upon a mere browser seemed ludicrous to me 20 years ago - so I may not be the best judge of those sort of things...
amelius 10y ago
Cool, but why not allow us to compile C code, and run everything in ASM.js? That would make it more Unix-like in my opinion. Also it would save you the trouble of writing a shell from scratch :)
- mrmondo 10y ago
  Don't even get me started on javascript, it's the new flash player.
  - oneweekwonder 10y ago
    Except, Flash Player is proprietary software; and JavaScript is a standardized programming language, with multiple implementations. But I get your sentiment; Welcome to the Atwood law.
    - mrmondo 10y ago
      I get you. My point: JavaScript, it's ecosystem and community are bad enough to be proprietary. It's the new skurge of the web browser and what do people do? Make 'applications' with it.
- david-given 10y ago
  My (limited) understanding is that asm.js doesn't allow blocking code, which means it's not a good fit for a Posix like model with a main function which calls out to external services. (I'd love to be wrong here.) I hear that there's a plan for some form of limited shared-memory concurrency which might be abusable to allow threads, but I haven't made much of the designs.
- nteon 10y ago
  Hi, I'm one of the main authors of Browsix. One of our goals is to run C code - we have simple utilities from sbase running, and more complex code like latex and GNU make (the README needs updating). The main complication is that C code does system calls, which are traditionally blocking, and there isn't a good way to achieve that in current browsers with just ASM.js. So, we currently use the Emterpreter[1] (which is much slower) to make sure that anything on the stack underneath a system call can be saved and restored. SharedArrayBuffers should let us implement something faster in the near future. 1 - https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki/Emterpreter https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki/Emterpreter
digi_owl 10y ago
Dunno if it is something to do with Firefox, but backspacing past $ produce some interesting error output. Seems to only happen right after a command though, hitting return a few times gets rid of it.
- nteon 10y ago
  Yea - the shell is an MVP, to say the least. I plan on replacing it later this week with something like term.js to provide a more consistent terminal experience.
tempodox 10y ago
It was only a question of time until someone would come up with this. The next logical step is to rewrite the browser in JS, so it can run inside the browser.
- throwanem 10y ago
  It's been done - see Gary Bernhardt's "The Birth and Death of Javascript".
jrcii 10y ago
A different animal (no pun intended) but this project also provides the ability to render a web-based shell if that's your primary use for this http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.4/ http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.4/ There's also this https://github.com/shellinabox/shellinabox https://github.com/shellinabox/shellinabox and this http://www.web-console.org/ http://www.web-console.org/

66 points by tremguy 10y ago

Wow, looks like a big deal. I've been reading through https://github.com/plasma-umass/browsix/blob/master/doc/report.pdf?raw=true https://github.com/plasma-umass/browsix/blob/master/doc/repo... which is a really nice article, but I'd recommend you to tell a bit more on what this level of indirection brings. You mention Bluetooth for example in the beginning which is an example of hardware that is yet not supported from the browser. Applications beyond what can currently be done in a UNIX shell would be good. You already have thought long about it. I feel you can tell us much more about possibilities!!!

OJFord 10y ago
> You mention Bluetooth for example in the beginning which > is an example of hardware that is yet not supported from > the browser. In what way? There's Cordova/PhoneGap, W3C Web Bluetooth; JS libraries like noble and bleat.
tremguy 10y ago
I'm not the author, sorry. Just spotted this on the Google Summer of Code projects list. Read through the paper too, quite creative stuff. I suppose Bluetooth was just an example as the project is still kind of proof of concept at present.
nteon 10y ago
Hi, one of the authors here. Thanks! We have a tech report, that has more details on what we are aiming for here: https://web.cs.umass.edu/publication/details.php?id=2414 https://web.cs.umass.edu/publication/details.php?id=2414 As another example of what we can do with real Unix abstractions in the browser, we have : https://meme.bpowers.net/ https://meme.bpowers.net/ Which runs a standard Go HTTP server in a web worker, and instead of doing XMLHttpRequests to a remote service, can route those requests to the in-browser HTTP server! In this case it is about 10x slower, but I think that is an artifact of the GopherJS compiler I have yet to work out.

jrapdx3 10y ago

Looks interesting but did anyone get the demo to work? Click on the "live demo" link, quite a long delay (few minutes), finally terminal-like display appears with "$" prompt. However entering usual unix commands, ls, cd, etc., gives error: "Error while executing /usr/bin/ls: TypeError: get length method called on incompatible Object", or "/usr/bin/cd: command not found". Running with FF Nightly. Don't know if it's me, FF, or the app. What am I missing?

timlyo 10y ago
ls /usr/bin gives me: cp cat cpu-intensive-program curl dot echo exec fork_test go-bench grep head hello hello-socket http-example lat_syscall ls mkdir nice node pipeline-example priority-test rm rmdir sh sha1sum socket-example sort stat tail tee touch wc xargs Doesn't seem to be cd, but ls does work. Chromium on Arch.
- pdkl95 10y ago
  > Doesn't seem to be cd That's expected: $ lsb_release -i Distributor ID: Gentoo $ ls {,/usr}/bin/cd ls: cannot access /bin/cd: No such file or directory ls: cannot access /usr/bin/cd: No such file or directory $ type cd cd is a shell builtin If it isn't working in this javascript project, maybe it is only faking the Bourne shell (badly)?
nteon 10y ago
First, (as silly as it is), 'cd' is not yet implemented, as that is a shell intrinsic. Second, Firefox stable (46) is currently supported, but something has changed in the nightly that breaks us. It should be simple to track down, but in the meantime using almost anything other than FF nightly should work! (Safari, Gnome Web, Chrome{,ium}, IE Edge).

ianai 10y ago

Conceptually, I'm digging it. But what would the use cases look like? (not as a skeptic - as a 'I wonder what this opens up')

nteon 10y ago
A number of things - do you have a small microservice that was easier to write as server-side code, but you don't want to worry about scaling it? Run it in-browser without code changes or worrying about jank - the server is run in a Web Worker, and any long running computations can happen concurrently with rending, layout, and input handling. Same with traditional C and C++ applications. Wrapping program invocations or APIs with Emscripten can be a pain, and if you have a couple of programs you want to use together, forget it. Browsix lets you compile the program down to a single js file, provide input as you expect (by sticking files on a filesystem, or providing stdin), and register a handle for stdout + stderr.
- liotier 10y ago
  I can't decide if you are serious or tongue-in-cheek... I'm worried.
  - nteon 10y ago
    I'm quite serious. What's your concern - that it is unrealistic, or that we should stick with mostly-static, single-threaded web-pages forever?
    - liotier 10y ago
      I feel that the additional layers of indirection are quite costly for the convenience of running programs in a Unix environment inside the browser. I can understand the practicality of that for prototyping, but it seems a bit baroque for a production system. But then, the idea of heaping Javascript monsters upon a mere browser seemed ludicrous to me 20 years ago - so I may not be the best judge of those sort of things...

amelius 10y ago

Cool, but why not allow us to compile C code, and run everything in ASM.js? That would make it more Unix-like in my opinion. Also it would save you the trouble of writing a shell from scratch :)

mrmondo 10y ago
Don't even get me started on javascript, it's the new flash player.
- oneweekwonder 10y ago
  Except, Flash Player is proprietary software; and JavaScript is a standardized programming language, with multiple implementations. But I get your sentiment; Welcome to the Atwood law.
  - mrmondo 10y ago
    I get you. My point: JavaScript, it's ecosystem and community are bad enough to be proprietary. It's the new skurge of the web browser and what do people do? Make 'applications' with it.
david-given 10y ago
My (limited) understanding is that asm.js doesn't allow blocking code, which means it's not a good fit for a Posix like model with a main function which calls out to external services. (I'd love to be wrong here.) I hear that there's a plan for some form of limited shared-memory concurrency which might be abusable to allow threads, but I haven't made much of the designs.
nteon 10y ago
Hi, I'm one of the main authors of Browsix. One of our goals is to run C code - we have simple utilities from sbase running, and more complex code like latex and GNU make (the README needs updating). The main complication is that C code does system calls, which are traditionally blocking, and there isn't a good way to achieve that in current browsers with just ASM.js. So, we currently use the Emterpreter[1] (which is much slower) to make sure that anything on the stack underneath a system call can be saved and restored. SharedArrayBuffers should let us implement something faster in the near future. 1 - https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki/Emterpreter https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki/Emterpreter

digi_owl 10y ago

Dunno if it is something to do with Firefox, but backspacing past $ produce some interesting error output. Seems to only happen right after a command though, hitting return a few times gets rid of it.

nteon 10y ago
Yea - the shell is an MVP, to say the least. I plan on replacing it later this week with something like term.js to provide a more consistent terminal experience.

tempodox 10y ago

It was only a question of time until someone would come up with this. The next logical step is to rewrite the browser in JS, so it can run inside the browser.

throwanem 10y ago
It's been done - see Gary Bernhardt's "The Birth and Death of Javascript".

jrcii 10y ago

A different animal (no pun intended) but this project also provides the ability to render a web-based shell if that's your primary use for this http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.4/ http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.4/ There's also this https://github.com/shellinabox/shellinabox https://github.com/shellinabox/shellinabox and this http://www.web-console.org/ http://www.web-console.org/