WebCM

WebCM is a serverless terminal that runs a virtual Linux directly in the browser by emulating a RISC-V machine.

It's powered by the Cartesi Machine emulator, which enables deterministic, verifiable and sandboxed execution of RV64GC Linux applications.

It's packaged as a single 24MiB WebAssembly file containing the emulator, the kernel and Alpine Linux operating system.

Try it now by clicking on the image above.

Building

Assuming you have Docker installed and also set up to run riscv64 via QEMU, just do:

make

It should build required dependencies and ultimately webcm.mjs and webcm.wasm which are required by index.html.

Testing

To test locally, you could run a simple HTTP server:

python -m http.server 8080

Then navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8080/

How it works?

The Cartesi Machine emulator library was compiled to WASM using Emscripten toolchain. Then a simple C program instantiates a new Linux machine and boots in interactive terminal.

To have a terminal in the browser the following projects were used:

• https://github.com/mame/xterm-pty
• https://xtermjs.org