What is CASTANETS?

Castanets is an evolutionary web browser for next generation networks (5G and beyond).

The proliferation of smart electronic devices and the advancement of high-speed wireless networks have been driving the exponential growth of web users and web applications. As specifications of the web technologies expand, the memory consumption and computing power requirements of the browsers are increasing significantly. However, the web browsers are becoming unsuitable for embedded devices and consumer electronics devices. Unlike PCs and smartphones, both computing capabilities and memory capacities are extremely limited in IoT-enabled devices. Recent Chromium, in general, consume more than 150MB of memories to view popular websites. When the number of tabs increases, the memory usages increase proportionally and turn out to be unacceptable for embedded devices.

Considering aforementioned aspects of browser overheads, we propose an in-home edge-distributed split web browser; Castanets. The split rendering processes run memory intensive component on the distributed in-home edge devices while the browser process runs GPU intensive and composites results on the screen.

If you are interested to join the project, don't hesitate to contact us! For any inquiries or questions regarding Castanets, we will gladly reply! castanets atsign samsung.com

How to build & run castanets

1. Install depot_tools

Clone the depot_tools repository:

$ git clone https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/tools/depot_tools.git

Add depot_tools to the end of your PATH (you will probably want to put this in your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc). Assuming you cloned depot_tools to ./depot_tools:

$ export PATH="$PATH:$PWD/depot_tools"

2. Get the code

Create a chromium directory for the checkout and change to it (you can call this whatever you like and put it wherever you like, as long as the full path has no spaces):

$ mkdir $PWD/castanets && cd $PWD/castanets

Download the code using the command below.

$ git clone https://github.com/Samsung/castanets src

If you did not specify the 'src' directory name at the end of the command, the source code would have been downloaded to the 'castanets' directory. In this case, change the directory name.

$ mv castanets src

Change directory to src

cd ./src

3. How To Build Castanets for Ubuntu (Both a Browser Process and a Renderer Process)

Install additional build dependencies

$ build/install-build-deps.sh

3.1 Run the sync

We need a gclient configuration. To create a .gclient file, run:

$ build/create_gclient.sh

Once you've run install-build-deps at least once, you can now run the Chromium-specific sync, which will download additional binaries and other things you might need:

$ gclient sync --with_branch_head

3.2 Argument Setup for Build

Chromium uses Ninja as its main build tool along with a tool called GN to generate .ninja files. You can create any number of build directories with different configurations. To create a build directory, run:

$ gn gen --args='enable_castanets=true enable_nacl=false is_debug=false' out/Default

for faster build, you may add following options

remove_webcore_debug_symbols=true
is_component_build=true
use_jumbo_build=true

3.3 Build castanets for Ubuntu

Build castanets (the “chrome” target) with Ninja using the command:

$ autoninja -C out/Default chrome

(Optional) 4. Build Castanets for Android (Only a Renderer Process)

For now, we need a rooted Android phone to run Android Renderers.

Install additional build dependencies

$ build/install-build-deps-android.sh

4.1 Run the sync

We need a gclient configuration. To create a .gclient file, run:

$ build/create_gclient.sh

4.2 Add target OS(Android) Option

We add target OS information to gclient.

echo "target_os = [ 'android' ]" >> ../.gclient

Once you've run install-build-deps-android at least once, you can now run the Chromium-specific sync, which will download additional binaries and other things you might need:

$ gclient run-hooks
$ gclient sync --with_branch_head

4.3 Argument Setup for Build

Chromium uses Ninja as its main build tool along with a tool called GN to generate .ninja files. You can create any number of build directories with different configurations. To create a build directory, run:

$ gn gen --args='target_os="android" enable_castanets=true enable_nacl=false is_debug=false' out/Android

for faster build, you may add following options

remove_webcore_debug_symbols=true
is_component_build=true
use_jumbo_build=true

4.4 Build castanets for Android

Build castanets (the “chrome” target) with Ninja using the command:

$ autoninja -C out/Android chrome_public_apk

5. How To run Castanets

5.1 Runtime Options

5.1.1 Compositor related runtime option

To run castanets between different devices, we have options for compositor.
Followings are options that needs to be handled for running Castanets in pair.

5.2 Run castanets in a local Ubuntu machine

Start first chrome instance: Browser Process

$ out/Default/chrome <URL> --enable-castanets

Start second chrome instance: Renderer Process

$ out/Default/chrome --type=renderer --enable-castanets=127.0.0.1

5.3 Run castanets in a distributed environment

5.3.1 Local Ubuntu Browser and Remote Ubuntu Renderer

Device A: Browser Process

$ out/Default/chrome <URL> --enable-castanets

Device B: Renderer Process

$ out/Default/chrome --type=renderer --enable-castanets=<BROWSER IP ADDR>

5.3.2 Local Ubuntu Browser and Remote Android Renderer

Device A: Browser Process

$ out/Default/chrome <URL> --enable-castanets

Android Device B: Renderer Process Please setup adb(Android Debug Bridge) first.

To run Android renderer, adb shell with su permission

$(adb) echo "_ --type=renderer --enable-castanets="BROWSER IP ADDR"" > /data/local/tmp/chrome-command-line

Then touch the Castanets icon from the screen to execute renderer