3f3afb455e
This commit removes support for the `userfaultfd` or "uffd" syscall on Linux. This support was originally added for users migrating from Lucet to Wasmtime, but the recent developments of kernel-supported copy-on-write support for memory initialization wound up being more appropriate for these use cases than usefaultfd. The main reason for moving to copy-on-write initialization are: * The `userfaultfd` feature was never necessarily intended for this style of use case with wasm and was susceptible to subtle and rare bugs that were extremely difficult to track down. We were never 100% certain that there were kernel bugs related to userfaultfd but the suspicion never went away. * Handling faults with userfaultfd was always slow and single-threaded. Only one thread could handle faults and traveling to user-space to handle faults is inherently slower than handling them all in the kernel. The single-threaded aspect in particular presented a significant scaling bottleneck for embeddings that want to run many wasm instances in parallel. * One of the major benefits of userfaultfd was lazy initialization of wasm linear memory which is also achieved with the copy-on-write initialization support we have right now. * One of the suspected benefits of userfaultfd was less frobbing of the kernel vma structures when wasm modules are instantiated. Currently the copy-on-write support has a mitigation where we attempt to reuse the memory images where possible to avoid changing vma structures. When comparing this to userfaultfd's performance it was found that kernel modifications of vmas aren't a worrisome bottleneck so copy-on-write is suitable for this as well. Overall there are no remaining benefits that userfaultfd gives that copy-on-write doesn't, and copy-on-write solves a major downsides of userfaultfd, the scaling issue with a single faulting thread. Additionally copy-on-write support seems much more robust in terms of kernel implementation since it's only using standard memory-management syscalls which are heavily exercised. Finally copy-on-write support provides a new bonus where read-only memory in WebAssembly can be mapped directly to the same kernel cache page, even amongst many wasm instances of the same module, which was never possible with userfaultfd. In light of all this it's expected that all users of userfaultfd should migrate to the copy-on-write initialization of Wasmtime (which is enabled by default).
wasmtime
A standalone runtime for WebAssembly
A Bytecode Alliance project
Guide | Contributing | Website | Chat
Installation
The Wasmtime CLI can be installed on Linux and macOS with a small install script:
curl https://wasmtime.dev/install.sh -sSf | bash
Windows or otherwise interested users can download installers and binaries directly from the GitHub Releases page.
Example
If you've got the Rust compiler installed then you can take some Rust source code:
fn main() {
println!("Hello, world!");
}
and compile/run it with:
$ rustup target add wasm32-wasi
$ rustc hello.rs --target wasm32-wasi
$ wasmtime hello.wasm
Hello, world!
Features
-
Lightweight. Wasmtime is a standalone runtime for WebAssembly that scales with your needs. It fits on tiny chips as well as makes use of huge servers. Wasmtime can be embedded into almost any application too.
-
Fast. Wasmtime is built on the optimizing Cranelift code generator to quickly generate high-quality machine code at runtime.
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Configurable. Whether you need to precompile your wasm ahead of time, or interpret it at runtime, Wasmtime has you covered for all your wasm-executing needs.
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WASI. Wasmtime supports a rich set of APIs for interacting with the host environment through the WASI standard.
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Standards Compliant. Wasmtime passes the official WebAssembly test suite, implements the official C API of wasm, and implements future proposals to WebAssembly as well. Wasmtime developers are intimately engaged with the WebAssembly standards process all along the way too.
Language Support
You can use Wasmtime from a variety of different languages through embeddings of the implementation:
- Rust - the
wasmtimecrate - C - the
wasm.h,wasi.h, andwasmtime.hheaders or usewasmtimeConan package - C++ - the
wasmtime-cpprepository or usewasmtime-cppConan package - Python - the
wasmtimePyPI package - .NET - the
WasmtimeNuGet package - Go - the
wasmtime-gorepository
Documentation
📚 Read the Wasmtime guide here! 📚
The wasmtime guide is the best starting point to learn about what Wasmtime can do for you or help answer your questions about Wasmtime. If you're curious in contributing to Wasmtime, it can also help you do that!
It's Wasmtime.