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

binsquare

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!

fqiao

Give it a try folks. Would really love to hear all the feedbacks! Cheers!

harshdoesdev

its a really innovative idea! very interested in the subsecond coldstart claim, how does it achieve that?

cr125rider

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

0cf8612b2e1e

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.

bch

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...

gavinray

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

lambdanodecore

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.

ukuina

Doesn't Docker's sbx do this? https://docs.docker.com/reference/cli/sbx/

messh

https://shellbox.dev is a hosted version of something very similar

isterin

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.

cperciva

See also SmolBSD -- similar idea, similar name, using NetBSD.

nonameiguess

What are you actually doing on top of libkrun? Providing really small machine images that boot quickly? If I run the smolvm run --image alpine example, what is "alpine?" Where is that image coming from? Does this have some built-in default registry of machine images it pulls from? Does it need an Internet connection that allows outbound access to wherever this registry runs? Is it one of a default set of pre-built images that comes with the software itself and is stored on my own filesystem? Where are the builds for these images? Where do these machine images end up? ~/.local/share/smolvm/?

parasitid

hi! congrats for your work that's really nice. question: why do you report that qemu is 15s<x<30s? for instance with katacontainers, you can run fast microvms, and even faster with unikernels. what was your setup? thanks a lot

akoenig

smolvm is awesome. The team is highly responsive and very experienced. They clearly know what they’re doing. I’m currently evaluating smolvm for my project, https://withcave.ai , where I’m using Incus for isolation. The initial integration results look very promising!

mrbluecoat

Can .smolmachine be digitally signed and self authenticate when run? Similar to https://docs.sylabs.io/guides/main/user-guide/signNverify.ht...

chrisweekly

This looks awesome. Thanks for sharing!

irickt

Is there a relation to the similarly-purposed and similarly-named https://github.com/CelestoAI/SmolVM

rkagerer

I see you support Linux and MacOS hosts. Any Windows support planned?

timsuchanek

This is very exciting. It enables a cross platform, language agnostic plugin system, especially for agents, while being safe in a VM.