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Smol Machines

29 points by fumplethumb ago | 2 comments

dang |next [-]

Recent and related:

Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47808268 - April 2026 (152 comments)

aw-engineer |previous [-]

This description from the https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm is helpful

  Each workload gets real hardware isolation — its own kernel on Hypervisor.framework (macOS), KVM (Linux), or the Windows Hypervisor Platform (Windows). libkrun VMM with custom kernel: libkrunfw. Pack it into a .smolmachine and it runs anywhere the host architecture matches, with zero dependencies.

  Images use the OCI format — the same open standard Docker uses. Any image on Docker Hub, ghcr.io, or other OCI registries can be pulled and booted as a microVM. No Docker daemon required.