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https://github.com/plasma-umass/browsix

Browsix is a Unix-like operating system for the browser.
https://github.com/plasma-umass/browsix

browserfs javascript-framework unix-like

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Browsix is a Unix-like operating system for the browser.

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README 

        
Browsix - Bringing Unix to the Browser

======================================



[![NPM version](https://badge.fury.io/js/browsix.svg)](http://badge.fury.io/js/browsix)

[![david-dm-status-badge](https://david-dm.org/plasma-umass/browsix.svg)](https://david-dm.org/jvilk/browserfs#info=dependencies&view=table)

[![david-dm-status-badge](https://david-dm.org/plasma-umass/browsix/dev-status.svg)](https://david-dm.org/plasma-umass/browsix#info=devDependencies&view=table)



While standard operating systems like Unix make it relatively simple

to build complex applications, web browsers lack the features that

make this possible.  This project is Browsix, a JavaScript-only

framework that brings the essence of Unix to the browser. Browsix

makes core Unix features available to web applications (including

pipes, processes, signals, sockets, and a shared file system) and

extends JavaScript runtimes for C, C++, Go, and Node.js programs so

they can run in a Unix-like environment within the browser. Browsix

also provides a POSIX-like shell that makes it easy to compose

applications together for parallel data processing via pipes.



*For more details, check out our [tech

report (PDF)](https://web.cs.umass.edu/publication/details.php?id=2414)*.



Another way to think about this is that modern web applications are

multi-process by nature - the client and some of the application logic

lives in the browser, and some of it lives in the cloud, often

implemented as

[microservices](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microservices).



Browsix lets you rethink the boundary between code executing in the

browser vs. server-side, while taking advantage of the multi-core

nature of modern computing devices.



Browsix enables you to compose the in-browser part of your web

applications out of processes.  Processes behave as you would expect

coming from [Unix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix): they run in

parallel with the main browser thread, can communicate over pipes,

sockets, or the filesystem, and can create subprocesses.  This process

model is implemented on top of existing browser APIs, like [web

workers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_worker), so it works in all

modern browsers.  Browsix applications can be served statically or

over a [CDN](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network).



### The Browsix Shell



As a proof of concept, we've implemented a POSIX-like shell on top of

Browsix, along with an implementation of a number of standard Unix

utilities (`cat`, `tee`, `echo`, `sha1sum`, and friends).  The

utilities are all standard node programs that will run directly under

node, or in the browser under Browsix.  Individual commands are

executed in their own workers, and piping works as expected:



![shell](doc/img/shell.png)



Try it out here: [live demo!](https://unix.bpowers.net/)



### Meme creator



Browsix is useful for more than web terminals.  With Browsix, you can

run Go microservices directly in the browser!  As an example, we have

implemented a meme creator, that lets you create memes (sometimes

known as image macros) with (hopefully) humorous text on top of

several images.  We wrote this as a standard REST service in Go,

accepting the text and image type as parameters, and returning a PNG.

We used [our modified

GopherJS](https://github.com/bpowers/browsix-gopherjs) compiler to

compile the Go service (including all dependencies, such as the

TrueType font renderer and image manipulation libraries) to

JavaScript, and Browsix to run this JavaScript as a process in a

background Web Worker.  We then dynamically route requests to either

this in-browser server or a remote server depending on user agent and

network connectivity.






### Details



Browsix currently supports running node.js, Go, and C/C++ programs.

It supports Go with a [modified GopherJS

compiler](https://github.com/bpowers/browsix-gopherjs) (requires a

host [Go 1.6 install for

now](https://github.com/bpowers/browsix-gopherjs/issues/2)), and C/C++

with [modifications to

Emscripten](https://github.com/bpowers/emscripten/tree/_browsix).



### Browsix-SPEC



Browsix supports executing SPEC CPU2006 and SPEC CPU2017 benchmarks using Browsix-SPEC

interface. 



Using Browsix

-------------



There are two parts to Browsix: build tooling (the modified Go + C

compilers) and runtime support (the kernel + Browsix APIs).



Get browsix through npm:



```

    $ npm install --save browsix

```



Building & Testing

------------------



Browsix requires **nodejs 4.3.0** or later, which is more recent than

the version packaged in Ubuntu Wiley.  To get a recent version of

node, follow the instructions on the [node.js

website](https://nodejs.org/en/download/package-manager/#debian-and-ubuntu-based-linux-distributions).

If you don't know whether you should choose node 4.x or 5.x, choose

4.x (it is the long-term support branch).



Browsix has three other dependencies: `git`, `npm` (usually installed

along with node), and `make`, and builds on OSX and Linux systems.

Once you have those dependencies:



```

    $ git clone --recursive https://github.com/plasma-umass/browsix

    $ cd browsix

    $ make test-once serve

```



This will pull the dependencies, build the runtime and all the

utilities, run a number of tests in either Firefox or Chrome, and then

launch a copy of the shell served locally.



`Dockerfile`

-----------



```sh

$ ./docker/build.sh

....

root@3695ed0cdf45:~/browsix# make test-once serve

  TEST

[13:07:00] Using gulpfile ~/browsix/gulpfile.js

[13:07:00] Starting 'copy-node-kernel'...

[13:07:00] Starting 'copy-node'...

[13:07:00] Starting 'lint-kernel'...

[13:07:00] Starting 'lint-browser-node'...

[13:07:00] Starting 'lint-bin'...

[13:07:00] Starting 'lint-syscall-api'...

[13:07:00] Finished 'copy-node-kernel' after 82 ms

[13:07:02] Finished 'lint-syscall-api' after 1.61 s

[13:07:04] Finished 'lint-kernel' after 3.72 s

[13:07:05] Finished 'lint-browser-node' after 4.46 s

[13:07:05] Finished 'lint-bin' after 5.08 s

[13:07:05] Starting 'build-bin'...

[13:07:06] Finished 'copy-node' after 5.16 s

[13:07:06] Starting 'build-kernel'...

[13:07:06] Starting 'build-browser-node'...

...

```



Building and using Browsix-SPEC

-------------------------------

After building Browsix, build Browsix-SPEC through make:

```

make browsix-spec

```

Follow the instructions in browsix-spec.md.



In-browser node limitations

---------------------------



Browsix's `browser-node` implementation has an important to understand

limitation: **you must explicitly call `process.exit()`**.  Without

this, utilities will work under real-node, but appear to hang under

`browser-node`.  This is not an intrinsic limitation, but it is a

hairy implementation detail -- node exits when the event loop is

empty, and there are no active timers or network callbacks.  For us to

do the same thing means we need to hook `setTimeout` and any other

functions that take callbacks to ensure we don't exit early.



Documentation

-------------



For a high-level overview of the system design and architecture,

please see [this document](doc/report.pdf).



Contributing

------------



You're interested in contributing?  That's great!



The process is similar to other open-source projects hosted on github:



* Fork the repository

* Make some changes

* Commit your changes with a descriptive commit message

* Open a pull request



Contact

-------



If you have questions or problems, please [open an

issue](https://github.com/plasma-umass/browsix/issues) on this

repository (plasma-umass/browsix).



Open Source

-----------



This project is licensed under the MIT license, but also incorporates

code from other sources.



Browsix uses [BrowserFS](https://github.com/jvilk/BrowserFS) for its

filesystem, which is [primarily MIT licensed](LICENSE.browserfs).



browser-node's [`nextTick`](src/browser-node/browser-node.ts#L114)

implementation comes from the

[acorn](https://github.com/ternjs/acorn) project, released under [the

MIT license](LICENSE.acorn).



A large portion of browser-node is the

[node](https://github.com/nodejs/node) standard library, which is [MIT

licensed](LICENSE.node).



Functions to convert buffers to utf-8 strings and back are derivative

of

[browserify](https://github.com/substack/node-browserify/blob/master/LICENSE)

implementations (ported to TypeScript), [MIT

licensed](LICENSE.browserify) as well.