Show HN: Kern – container and resource runtime in a 1.5 MB binary, no daemon

realexweb 53 points 6 comments August 24, 2026
github.com · View on Hacker News

I built kern because I needed a fast, zero-daemon tool to set CPU/RAM limits and run isolated tasks without the overhead of Docker. It's a single 1.5MB Rust binary using OCI images, cgroup v2, and namespaces. Boxes start in ~3.5ms. It's not a Kubernetes CRI or a microVM, just a standalone container and resource runtime for CLI and agents.

Discussion Highlights (3 comments)

jeffbee

It looks cool and I am building it r.n. but the submission title was a little misleading as it says "container ... runtime" right there, and I guess it is, but it is not a CRI implementation.

k8sify

Can’t wait to play with this, thank you great work!

chrisweekly

How does this compare to "smolvm" microvms from https://smolmachines.com ?

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