Which WASM features does CheerpX use? GC, BMO, Branch Hinting, Relaxed SIMD, Threads, Memory64?

I cannot speak for other VMs, in the case of CheerpX there is nothing fundamental preventing emulation/JIT-ting of 64-bit platforms, but it is an inefficient choice due to the current limitations of Wasm, in particular on the front of how much memory can be used in total. In the best case scenario it would be 4GB, but it's unlikely this can be achieved on all devices in the real world.

64-bit code by its nature consume more memory, each pointer is twice the size, which makes the memory limitation even more pressing for no advantage. Please note, that this is unrelated to the work on WebAssembly Memory64. The issue is not the lack of address space, but rather on the actual memory that can be allocated in practice.

For this public deployment of WebVM we have chosen to limit the maximum memory to 700MBs, which makes the demo work fine on the vast majority of devices, including mobile ones. This said, we do plan to support the 64-bit ISA in the future with the main use case of supporting all the existing docker images available on Docker Hub and similar platforms.

Appreciate your feedback on licensing and we will take it into account, but please notice that this article is specifically about WebVM, that is indeed FOSS. A separate article dedicated to the CheerpX 1.0 release will be published soon, and it will of course be very clear that the latter is proprietary.

The disk blocks are streamed on demand, so a connection is required.

The virtual disk is quite large (1.5GB) which is necessary to run a full distro but makes pre-downloading for offline mode not possible.

It _could_ work if you let your workload run once and then disconnect, but there is no guarantee.

Installing packages is supported both in the Debian terminal and Alpine desktop.

I want to clarify that we are not officially collaborating with GOG at this time, although we would love to do so.

We think CheerpX would be very useful in education, to provide ready-made environments for students that can be wiped out on demand. We also envision it to be an alternative to remote virtualization (e.g. Citrix) in the enterprise sector.

The promise of WebAssembly is bringing actual large scale applications to the browser.

To be clear, it is possible to build large apps with technologies like TypeScript, with VSCode being probably the standard bearer of this approach, but at Leaning Technologies we don't believe this solution to be viable for everybody.

We strongly believe that more "traditional" languages are required instead to work at scale, especially C++ and Java, and we offer products dedicated to these languages as well: Cheerp and CheerpJ respectively.

Although these languages might not be the most exciting ones, they have a proven track record for delivering large scale applications used by millions of people. Billions of people if the Operating Systems we all use are taken into account.

Thanks to WebAssembly these robust and scalable languages can be used to build Web apps. My own personal metric for the success of WebAssembly is seeing AAA games delivering playable demos as Web apps by cross-compiling (a portion of) the game to the browser.

Performance is expected to be between 3x-10x slowdown depending on the workload, which for this class of systems is quite good. The gap, especially on the high end, will further shrink as the virtualization engine improves.

Not all parts of the ISA are as well optimized currently. The codegen for integer operations (the most common by far) is very sophisticated. Floating point and vector operations still have a pretty basic implementation.

WebVM can run any distro, barring bugs in our syscall layer of course :-)

You can add your own Dockerfile and deploy a custom version on GitHub: https://github.com/leaningtech/webvm/?tab=readme-ov-file#for...

Also having trouble typing in terminal using firefox. Seems like keys are doubled or missing. I gave up after ten attempts to ping cnn.com

Would love to see a version of Tails running in the browser!

So I can control it's deployment, updates and not be at mercy if the website shuts down.

This is obviously sarcastic, because I don't think there is anyone out there who still believes the old fantasy about browsers/JS becoming the "universal platform"?

If only there was a mobile operating system based on the Linux kernel

Would it not be feasible to run a VPN/Proxy locally on the same machine but not in the browser and websocket the connection to WebVM? I don’t mean that WebVM should implement it, just asking if that would be an option if one doesn’t want to use the VPN service to connect to the internet.

it would seem that yes, you can?

If you can run an (allegedly) complete linux desktop environments that implies you can also run google chrome or firefox, and hence run WebVM.