Building a WebAssembly-first OS – An Adventure Into the Unorthodox
Talkat WasmCon 2023 · on Wednesday, 2023-09-06· at 15:45· Grand Ballroom E, Hyatt Regency Bellevue, 900 Bellevue Way NE·
summary
A WebAssembly-first OS replaces intercepted host syscalls with WebAssembly functions using a gVisor fork called scale-visor, currently handling four syscall families and routing file I/O into a Rust-based VFS that is 80% POSIX compliance; the VFS runs as its own Wasm instance to avoid context switches. A Dockerfile-to-Wasm tool named wasm unboxer produces standalone Wasm userland images. The claim: practical process, memory and access-control primitives live in the runtime, reducing kernel attack surface and eliminating many host context switches.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00WebAssembly-first OS intro
- 7:00Why build OS around WASM
- 10:13Starting user space programs
- 15:35Experiment: Scale Visor
- 16:37Experiment: Virtual file system
- 19:32Experiment: Docker to WASM
- 22:40Minimally viable WASM OS
- 27:19Benefits of kernel-less design
- 30:24Q&A
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