Olin Improvements

Published on , 1437 words, 6 minutes to read

Over the last week or so I've been doing a lot of improvements to Olin in order to make it ready to be the kernel for the minimum viable product of wasmcloud. Here's an overview of the big things that have happened from version 0.1.1 to version 0.4.0.

What is Olin?

Olin is a userspace kernel designed for multi-tenant secure computing. It provides isolation via WebAssembly to limit the attack scope of malicious user input, resource accounting via its runtime statistics, and a familiar Unix-like API. It is the core that you can build a functions as a service platform on top of.

As Olin is just a kernel, it needs some work in order to really shine as a true child of the cloud. That work is incoming during the next weeks and months.

Announcements

Here is what has been done since the last Olin post:

Official Docker Hub Build

The Docker Hub repo xena/olin now is automatically built off of the latest master release of Olin.

To use this image, run the following commands:

$ docker pull xena/olin:latest
$ docker run --rm -it xena/olin:latest sh

Then you can use the cwa tool to run programs in /wasm. See cwa -help for more information.

Deprecation of Go Support

For the moment, I am deprecating support for Go in GOOS=js GOARCH=wasm. The ABI for the Go compiler in this mode is too unstable for me right now. If other people want to fix abi/wasmgo to support Go 1.13 and newer, I would be very welcome to the patches.

The Entrypoint is Now _start()

Early on in the experiments that make up Olin, I have made a mistake in my fundamental understanding of how operating systems run programs. I thought that the main function would return the exit code of the program. This is not the case. There is a small shim that wraps the main function of your language and passes the result of it to exit(). Olin now copies this behavior. In order to return a value to the Olin runtime, you can either call runtime_exit() or return from the _start() function to exit with 0. Many thanks to Andrew Kelly for helping me realize this error.

This behavior is copied in the Olin rust package, which now has a fancy macro to automate the creation of the _start() function.

I am waiting on Zig to release a new nightly version in order to enable it, but the bring-your-own-OS package support in Zig means that the Zig standard library is starting to be exposed into Olin programs. Here's an example based on the example program:

pub const os = @import("./olin/olin.zig");
const std = @import("std");

pub fn main() anyerror!void {
    std.debug.warn("All your base are belong to us.\n", .{});
}

binfmt_misc Rigging

For a while I've had a binfmt_misc configuration floating around in the Olin repo. Here's how to use it:

First, install Olin's cmd/cwa to /usr/local/bin:

$ cd cmd/cwa
$ go build
$ sudo mv cwa /usr/local/bin

Then activate the binfmt_misc configuration:

$ cd ../../run/binfmt_misc
$ cat cwa.cfg | sudo tee /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register

Then you can run Olin programs without calling cwa:

$ ./olinfetch.wasm

Features

Policy Support

Olin now has a declarative policy engine for accessing external resources. This is inspired from OpenBSD pledge() and macOS sandboxing. These policies allow setting the following attributes:

Here's an example policy file intended to help with relaying webhooks:

## This is an example policy, the ## signifies this line is a comment.

## These are the URL patterns that this handler can open:
allow (
  ^https://tulpa.dev
  ^https://discordapp.com/api/webhooks/
  ^random://$
)

## These are the URL patterns that this handler cannot open:
disallow (
  ^https://tulpa.dev/admin.*$
)

## This is the ram limit in pages (64k each):
ram-page-limit 128

## This is the gas limit in instructions:
gas-limit 1048576

This would allow a WebAssembly program to open a HTTP socket to https://tulpa.dev (my git server) and Discord, but disallows any administrative API calls to my git server. It also allows the Olin program to use up to 128 pages of memory (about 8MB, which goes surprisingly far) and 1.04 million instructions. If the handler tries to open any resource that is not explicitly allowed, it is killed. If the handler tries to open a resource that is explicitly forbidden, it is killed. If the handler uses too much ram or too many instructions, it is killed.

This allows handlers to safely process user controlled input and even use that as part of the call to the open function.

When policies are violated, the error thrown is a vibe check failure:

$ cwa -policy ../policy/testdata/gitea.policy httptest.wasm
httptest.wasm: 2019/12/13 13:16:15 info: making request 
  to https://xena.greedo.xeserv.us/files/hello_olin.txt
httptest.wasm: 2019/12/13 13:16:15 vibe check failed: 
  https://xena.greedo.xeserv.us/files/hello_olin.txt 
  forbidden by policy
2019/12/13 13:16:15 httptest.wasm: exit status -1

runtime_exit() System Call

Along with making _start() the entrypoint, there comes a new problem: exiting. I fixed this by adding a runtime_exit() system call in Olin. When you call this function with the status code you want to return, execution of the Olin program instantly ends, uncleanly stopping everything and closing all files the program has open. This is similar to Linux's exit() system call.

It's probably best to save this call for cases where the program really can't/shouldn't continue executing, like for panic handlers.

Generic CGI Support

Previously there was a half-baked idea I called cwagi in Olin's codebase. The idea was to emulate part of how CGI worked in order to let Olin programs handle HTTP easily. I realize this was a mistake, so now it just supports normal CGI, conforming to RFC 3875.

End of File Error

One of the more common errors in operating systems is the "end of file" error. It is raised when a file has no more data in it. Olin didn't have this, but now it does.

Wasmcloud Features

Thanks to these improvements, the following wasmcloud features have been implemented:

As of the writing of this post, wasmcloud is currently 75% through the MVP development cycle. Here are the remaining issues:

Overall, this project is fun. Here's to 1.0 happening soon! Be well.

Facts and circumstances may have changed since publication. Please contact me before jumping to conclusions if something seems wrong or unclear.

Tags: wasm, wasmcloud, rust, zig, cgi