A new Balena Browser Block based on WPE WebKit is here

TL;DR: The balena-browser-wpe has been released. This is the result of using the WPE WebKit browser as the chosen web engine for the Balena Browser block. This opens a lot of doors for all kinds of things, really lowering the bar to checking out and exploring an official WPE build with Balena’s very convenient system (more below).

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It is my pleasure to announce the public release of the new Balena Browser Block based on WPE WebKit (balena-browser-wpe). This was completed by a close collaboration between Igalia and Balena developers, and was several months in the making. It was made possible in large part by the decision to use the WPE WebKit browser as the web engine for the Balena Browser block. Thanks to everyone involved for making it happen!

As a quick introduction for those who don’t know what Balena is or what they do, Balena.io is a well-known company due to being authors of balenaEtcher, the open-source utility widely used for flashing disk images onto storage media to create live SD cards and USB flash drives. But for some time now, they have been working on what they call Balena Cloud, a complete open-source stack of tools, images and services for deploying IoT services.

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Why you could be interested on continuing reading this post?

You might find this news especially interesting if:

• You are interested in building a Balena project using the new Linux graphical stack based on Wayland.
• You are looking for a browser solution with a very low memory footprint. This block is intended to be usable as an easy and fast evaluation channel for the WPE WebKit web rendering engine for embedded platforms.
• You are looking for a fully open ecosystem with standardized specifications for your project.
• You are optimizing your project for RaspberryPi 3 and RaspberryPi 4.

… and, specifically about WebKit, if:

• You are interested in a platform that uses the latest stable versions of WPE WebKit available.
• You are interested in playing with the experimental features for WPE WebKit.
• You are looking for a WPE WebKit solution using the WPE Freedesktop (FDO) backend (wpebackend-fdo).
• You are looking for a WPE WebKit solution using the Yocto meta-webkit recipes to build the binary images.

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The Balena Cloud , as I introduced before, is a complete set of tools for building, deploying, and managing IoT services on connected Linux devices. Balena is already providing service currently for around a half-million connected devices via the Balena Cloud. What I find especially interesting is that every Fleet (Balena’s term for a collection of devices) hosted on the Balena Cloud is running on a full open-source stack, from the OS flashed in the devices to the applications running on the top of the OS.

Another service they provide in this ecosystem is the Balena Hub, a catalog of IoT and edge projects created by a community. In this catalog you can find other reusable blocks or projects that you can reuse or adapt to build your own Balena project. The idea is that you can connect blocks like a kind of Lego so you can chose a X server, and then connect a dashboard, later a browser and so … In summary, in this Balena ecosystem you can find:

• Blocks:
  • Drop-in chunk of functionality built to handle the basics.
  • Defined as an Docker image (Dockerfile, docker-compose.yml).
• Projects:
  • Allows you to design your services in a plug&play way by using blocks.
  • Source code of a Fleet (forkeable).
• Fleets (== Applications):
  • Groups of devices running the same code for a specific task.
  • It can be private or public.

Coming back to initial point, what we are announcing here is two new Balena blocks that they will be part of the Balena Hub: 1) the balena-browser-wpe block and 2) the balena-weston block.

The design of the balena-browser-wpe block comes with significant innovations with respect to the Balena Browser, (balena-browser) which makes it significantly different from the former block. For example, contrary to other balena-browser, what uses a Chromium browser via the classical X11 Linux graphical system, the new balena-browser-wpe block provides a hardware accelerated web browser display based on WPE WebKit on the top of the new Linux graphical stack, Wayland, using the Weston compositor system.

Also WPE WebKit allows embedders to create simple and performant systems based on Web platform technologies. It is a WebKit port designed with flexibility and hardware acceleration in mind, leveraging common 3D graphics APIs for best performance.

Another important difference is that this project is intended to run entirely on a fully open graphical stack for the Raspberry Pi. That means the use of the Mesa VC4 graphics driver instead of the proprietary Broadcom driver for Raspberry Pi.

The Raspberry Pi Broadcom VideoCore 4 GPU (Graphical Processing Unit) is a OpenGL ES 2.0 3D and GLES 2.0 compatible engine. The closed source graphics stack runs on VC4 GPU and talks to V3D and display component using proprietary protocols. Instead of this, the Mesa VC4 driver provides the open-source implementation of open standards: the OpenGL (Open graphics Library), Vulkan and other graphics API specification (e.g: GLES2).

Finally, the API for interacting with GPU is enabled with the Mesa VC4 driver and provides, through Mesa, the access to to DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) subsystem of the Linux kernel responsible for interfacing with the GPU and the DMA Buffer Sharing Framework required for a efficient buffer export mechanism required by the Wayland compositor .

How can I start to play with the Balena Browser WPE?

This is the enjoyable part of the article. Balena provides many of the pieces that you will need, at least, from the point of view of the software (the hardware still has to be supplied by you ). From Balena you will get:

• The Balena OS, a downloadable OS image where the blocks will be executed in the top of this base system as isolated containers.
• The Balena Hub, a source repository for the projects to run in the top of Balena Cloud.
• and the Balena Cloud, a container-based platform for deploying IoT applications over all the connected devices.

Additional requirements are the sources for the blocks that we provide:

• The Balena WPE project, the reference project for building all of the required Balena blocks for running the WPE WebKit browser.
• The Balena Browser WPE block source code.
• The Balena Weston block source code.

To get the Balena Browser WPE project working on your Raspberry Pi 3 or 4, begin by following the Getting started guide. Once you reach the Running your first Container section, use the balena-wpe Github URL of the repository instead of the one provided. For example: git clone https://github.com/balenalabs/multicontainer-getting-started.git -> git clone https://github.com/Igalia/balena-wpe.git

Last but not least …

… now that the sources of the project are public, I intend to keep publishing short posts explaining in detail what I consider the relevant features of this project are. We also intend to create a public Balena Fleet based in this project. Personally, I think this it could be a nice and easy way to familiarize yourself with the Balena Browser WPE project, for those just getting started.

That’s all for now! I hope you will enjoy this contribution. More things are coming soon.