Explore setting up controlled environments with unix emulators

[ashwinkjoseph]

Explore the possibility of use tools for emulating UNIX environments to provide a complete implementation of Linux and attaching startup scripts that would control the user's interactions and guide them while providing just the tools required for each tutorial.

KEY THINGS TO LOOK FOR:

• Runs on WASM
• Should emulate the full Linux system including networking and file system
• Should allow for attaching startup scripts that automate the process of providing a pre-set up environment for each tutorial
• Preference for being based on containers so that for ease of building images with installed packages.

Some interesting tools to give a head start:

• Browsix - https://github.com/plasma-umass/browsix
• Containerd WASM - https://github.com/dmcgowan/containerd-wasm
• v86 - https://github.com/copy/v86
• https://github.com/s-macke/jor1k

[ashwinkjoseph]

Currently, I am the only one looking into this.
If anyone else is interested, please comment here and mention me so that I get notified and we could collaborate.
You can also reach out to me on the TPF Slack.

[mrei253]

@ashwinkjoseph
I came across JS/UX which might be easier to use, I don't know if that interests you
https://www.masswerk.at/termlib/
Free to use, as long as you embed a backlink to their webpage
And the javascript for loading one onto the webpage is pretty simple
It includes an insert method, which we could use for presetup scripts to help learners load sample code into the terminal to use/edit/run for each lesson

The only thing it doesn't run on WASM

[ashwinkjoseph]

@ashwinkjoseph
I came across JS/UX which might be easier to use, I don't know if that interests you
https://www.masswerk.at/termlib/
Free to use, as long as you embed a backlink to their webpage
And the javascript for loading one onto the webpage is pretty simple
It includes an insert method, which we could use for presetup scripts to help learners load sample code into the terminal to use/edit/run for each lesson

The only thing it doesn't run on WASM

@mrei253 Does this also come with a filesystem and a unix emulator? or is it similar to https://xtermjs.org/ or https://terminal.jcubic.pl/?

If it is similar to xtermjs or jquery terminal, we are already using jquery terminal.

I am currently investigating how to use this knowledge - https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/WebAssembly to compile runc to wasm and then use it as our runtime.

However, I am unable to find time for at least till mid - next week, if you could try this out, that would be great.

[mrei253]

@ashwinkjoseph
https://www.masswerk.at/jsuix/
This link contains a demo, don't know why it's so hard to find on their webpage

Unix emulator, has file system, support for basic shell scripts
Type in "features" or "help" or check out the documentation for commands here https://www.masswerk.at/jsuix/man.txt
File system works, touch to create a file, or cat/pipe output to a file, vi allows you to edit/ view to read. You can insert methods for the user to try out, and you can keep track of output to see what lesons they've accomplished

This should be a lot easier to implement and still give us more than enough linux commands to familiarize with

[ashwinkjoseph]

hey @mrei253 sorry for the late response, I was away for a while.
This looks really great, I couldnt' find it earlier for some reason.

Is it possible for us to also install runtimes such as C or python and execute programs in this as well?
Could you investigate further into how we can do this with this tool?

[ashwinkjoseph]

@mrei253 I also was looking into if we could run runc in wasm by compiling it into wasm using the procedure outlined in golang's support for wasm.

If this is possible, we could create containers for each runtime and execute them on wasm and the size would be very small and it would be efficient as well.

However, I am not sure how practical or possible this solution is as the document above from golang's support for wasm does state that it's possible only for packages that are main packages and dependencies have to be converted into main packages to be compiled into wasm.

[mrei253]

I'm not familiar with golang or wasm so I don't know how to answer that
But here are some python emulators you can embed on a website

https://www.brython.info
http://skulpt.org/

[jonathanrdelgado]

@ashwinkjoseph Took a look into if we could do compile runc with wasm.

For a repo, I cloned runc, updated go to 1.15.2 and ran GOOS=js GOARCH=wasm go build -o main.wasm. This resulted in the error

imports golang.org/x/sys/unix: build constraints exclude all Go files in /home/jdelgado/repos/forks/runc/vendor/golang.org/x/sys/unix

I was able to find golang/go#32548 which confirmed that the golang.org/x/sys/unix library is only able to be compiled for a Linux target, so specifying wasm (or even Windows) would result in an error. So your initial conclusion was correct that it doesn't seem like this is possible.