WALI: A Thin Linux Kernel Interface for WebAssembly

Explore a 45-minute conference talk introducing WALI: The WebAssembly Linux Interface, presented by Ben L. Titzer at ACM SIGPLAN's WAW'24 event. Dive into the development of a thin layer over Linux's userspace system calls that enables WebAssembly to seamlessly interact with native processes and the underlying operating system. Learn how WALI creates a new class of virtualization, offering application portability with minimal effort and reusing existing compiler backends. Discover how WebAssembly's control flow integrity guarantees provide an additional level of protection against remote code injection attacks. Examine the potential for virtualizing capability-based APIs like WASI using WALI, leading to improved reuse and robustness through better layering. Gain insights into the implementation of WALI in a modern WebAssembly engine and its performance evaluation on various applications that can now be compiled with mostly trivial effort.