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Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines

https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm
88•binsquare•2h ago

Comments

binsquare•2h ago
Hello, I'm building a replacement for docker containers with a virtual machine with the ergonomics of containers + subsecond start times.

I worked in AWS previously in the container space + with firecracker. I realized the container is an unnecessary layer that slowed things down + firecracker was a technology designed for AWS org structure + usecase.

So I ended up building a hybrid taking the best of containers with the best of firecracker.

Let me know your thoughts, thanks!

harshdoesdev•1h ago
+1. i built something similar called shuru.run because i wanted an easy way to set up microVM sandboxes to run some of my AI apps, and firecracker wasn't available for macOS (and, as you said, it is just too heavy for normal user-level workloads).
fqiao•1h ago
Yes, having a light-weight solution for local devices as well is one primary goal of the design. Another one is to make it easy for hosting, self or managed
sahil-shubham•1h ago
Nice work on Shuru — I remember looking at it when I was researching this space. You went with a Rust wrapper on Apple’s Virtualization framework right?

I have been working on something similar but on top of firecracker, called it bhatti (https://github.com/sahil-shubham/bhatti).

I believe anyone with a spare linux box should be able to carve it into isolated programmable machines, without having to worry about provisioning them or their lifecycle.

The documentation’s still early but I have been using it for orchestrating parallel work (with deploy previews), offloading browser automation for my agents etc. An auction bought heztner server is serving me quite well :)

harshdoesdev•25m ago
bhatti's cli looks very ergonomic! great job!

also, yes, shuru was (still) a wrapper over the Virtualization.framework, but it now supports Linux too (wrapper over KVM lol)

thm•1h ago
You could add OrbStack to the comp. table
fqiao•1h ago
Will do. Thanks for the suggestion!
sdrinf•1h ago
hi, great project! Windows support is sorely lacking, though. As someone working a lot with sandboxed LLMs right now, the options-space on windows for sandboxing is _extremely lacking_. Any plans to support it?
binsquare•1h ago
Yeah, it's in my mind.

WSL2 runs a linux virtual machine. Need to take some time and care to wire that up, but definitely feasible.

fqiao•1h ago
Hey, thanks so much! yah we will definitely add windows support later. We are exploring how to get this work with WSL and will release it asap. Stay tuned and thanks!
PufPufPuf•16m ago
Hey this is super cool. I've been researching tech like this for my AI sandboxing solution, ended up with Lima+Incus: https://github.com/JanPokorny/locki

My problem with microVMs was that they usually won't run docker / kubernetes, I work on apps that consist of whole kubernetes clusters and want the sandbox to contain all that.

Does your solution support running k3s for example?

fqiao•2h ago
Give it a try folks. Would really love to hear all the feedbacks!

Cheers!

leetrout•1h ago
why did you seemingly create two HN accounts?

Edit: I see this appears to be a contributor to the project as well. It was not obvious to me.

fqiao•1h ago
this is me: https://github.com/phooq

@binsquare is this one: https://github.com/BinSquare

harshdoesdev•1h ago
its a really innovative idea! very interested in the subsecond coldstart claim, how does it achieve that?
fqiao•1h ago
@binsquare basically brute-force trimmed down unnecessary linux kernel modules, tried to get the vm started with just bare minimum. There are more rooms for improvement for sure. We will keep trying!
harshdoesdev•1h ago
nice! for most local workloads, it is actually sufficient. so, do you ship a complete disk snapshot of the machines?
fqiao•1h ago
Yes. files on the disks are kept across stop and restart. We also have a pack command to compress the machine as a single file so that it can shipped and rehydrated elsewhere
deivid•1h ago
With this approach I managed to get to sub-10ms start (to pid1), if you can accept a few constraints there's plenty of room!

Though my version was only tested on Linux hosts

binsquare•36m ago
would be interested to see how you do it, how can I connect with you - emotionally?
cr125rider•1h ago
Great job with the comparison table. Immediately I was like “neat sounds like firecracker” then saw your table to see where it was similar and different. Easy!

Nice job! This looks really cool

fqiao•1h ago
Thanks so much
0cf8612b2e1e•1h ago
This looks very cool. Does the VM machinery still work if I run it in a bubblewrap? Can it talk to a GPU?

Can you pipe into one? It would be cute if I could wget in machine 1 and send that result to offline machine 2 for processing.

binsquare•1h ago
Haven't tried with bubblewrap - but it should.

Yes! GPU passthrough is being actively worked on and will land in next major release: https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm/pull/96

Yea just tried piping, it works:

``` smolvm machine exec --name m1 -- wget -qO- https://example.com/data.csv \ | smolvm machine exec --name m2 -i -- python3 process.py ```

bch•1h ago
see too[0][1] for projects of a similar* vein, incl historical account.

*yes, FreeBSD is specifically developed against Firecracker which is specifically avoided w "Smol machines", but interesting nonetheless

[0] https://github.com/NetBSDfr/smolBSD

[1] https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/freebsd-fire...

binsquare•23m ago
that was one of my inspirations but I don't think they went far enough in innovation.

microvm space is still underserved.

bch•16m ago
> that was one of my inspirations

Colins FreeBSD work or Emiles NetBSD work?

gavinray•36m ago
The feature that lets you create self-contained binaries seems like a potentially simpler way to package JVM apps than GraalVM Native.

Probably a lot of other neat usecases for this, too

  smolvm pack create --image python:3.12-alpine -o ./python312
  ./python312 run -- python3 --version
  # Python 3.12.x — isolated, no pyenv/venv/conda needed
binsquare•14m ago
yeah, it's analogous to Electron.

Electron ships your web app bundled with a browser.

Smol machines ship your software packaged with a linux vm. No need for dependency management or compatibility issues because it is baked in.

I think this is how Codex or Claude Code should be shipped by default, to avoid any isolation issues tbh

lambdanodecore•29m ago
Basically any open source project nowadays run their software stack in containers often requiring docker compose. Unfortunatley Smol machines do not support Docker inside the microvms and they also do not support nested VMs for things that use Vagrant. I think this is a big drawback.
binsquare•27m ago
I can support docker - will ship a compatible kernel with the necessary flags in the next release.
lambdanodecore•21m ago
I tried something like this already, also including nested kvm. I think this will increase the boot time quiet a bit.

Also libkrun is not secure by default. From their README.md:

> The libkrun security model is primarily defined by the consideration that both the guest and the VMM pertain to the same security context. For many operations, the VMM acts as a proxy for the guest within the host. Host resources that are accessible to the VMM can potentially be accessed by the guest through it.

> While defining the security implementation of your environment, you should think about the guest and the VMM as a single entity. To prevent the guest from accessing host's resources, you need to use the host's OS security features to run the VMM inside an isolated context. On Linux, the primary mechanism to be used for this purpose is namespaces. Single-user systems may have a more relaxed security policy and just ensure the VMM runs with a particular UID/GID.

> While most virtio devices allow the guest to access resources from the host, two of them require special consideration when used: virtio-fs and virtio-vsock+TSI.

> When exposing a directory in a filesystem from the host to the guest through virtio-fs devices configured with krun_set_root and/or krun_add_virtiofs, libkrun does not provide any protection against the guest attempting to access other directories in the same filesystem, or even other filesystems in the host.

ukuina•20m ago
Doesn't Docker's sbx do this?

https://docs.docker.com/reference/cli/sbx/

binsquare•7m ago
sandboxing is one of the features of virtual machines.

I'm building a different virtual machine.

messh•14m ago
https://shellbox.dev is a hosted version of something very similar
isterin•6m ago
We’re using smolmachines to create environments for our agents to execute code. It’s been great so far and the team is super responsive. The dev ergonomics are also great.

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