This project is very cool! One readme nit: "Pack a stateful virtual machine into a single file (.smolmachine) to rehydrate on any supported platform." For awhile I thought this meant that you could rehydrate a machine's memory like you can with a firecracker vm, but as far as I can tell you can't? It's stateful == disk?
Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines
131–140 of 162 posts
Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines
#132Hello, 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…
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?
Not sure what level of sandboxing you need. Is Sandboxie not enough?
Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines
#133Hello, 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…
Any Windows support coming? My dev team is on Windows, this could be a game-changer.
Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines
#134Hello, 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…
Any Windows support coming? My dev team is on Windows, this could be a game-changer.
Wsl2 runs a Linux vm so it definitely feasible and has the api's necessary.
It is on the roadmap, but frankly I haven't used Windows in a decade. I would love for a contributor to take that on as part of the free and open source spirit.
Sounds like it could be you? :)
Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
How "fat" are the packed machines? In other words, how much bloat is inevitable, or is that entirely controlled by the base image + the user's smolvm machine spec? How does smolvm's pack compare to something like dockerc [0] in terms of speed and size? Disclaimer: I just learned about dockerc! I can't actually create and test a pack right now because of [1], but I love the idea of using this to distribute application…
pretty light weight!
About the same size as the docker image to be honest. Join the discord and I'm happy to give you a white glove experience with onboarding :)
Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines
#136im keen to check this out. since I've moved 100% to the Mac [1] I've been keen to move away from Docker to something like Apple Containers [2] which runs each "container" as an isolated vm. So I wanna try this out, too.
[1] shameful self plug: https://gigatexal.blog/pages/i-heart-my-macbook/i-heart-my-m...
Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean making any given VM stop on host A and appear on host B; e.g. standard Qemu/KVM: virsh migrate --live GuestName DestinationURL This is feasible when network storage is available and useful when a host needs to be drained for maintenance.
I see. so right now smolvm can be stopped, and then "packed" (think of it as compressed), and restart on a different host. files in the disks are preserved, but memory snapshotting is still hard tbh
Ultimately the original does get stopped, but with additional techniques, we're talking milliseconds of downtime between when the old one stops and the new one resumes. (For live migration technology in general, no clue about smol machines.)
Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really related to this 'discussion' but this is an interesting problem in the AI space. It's essentially a well understood problem in unreliable distributed systems - if you have a series of steps that might not respond with the same answer every time (because one might fail usually) then how do you get to a useful and reliable outcome? I've been experimenting with running a prompt multiple times and having an ag…
Don’t know if this is an annoying response… but how about just going through the code and check and grade the quality yourself?
I could do, but the end goal is to scale this to 100x what I can do myself, and there isn't time to review all those changes. By attempting to answer the problem when it's tiny and I can still keep it in my head then I'll end up building something that works at scale.
Maybe. The point is that this is all new, and looking forwards I think it's worth figuring out this stuff early.
Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
+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).
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 pro…
Is there a way to store configuration/data of applications running on a Bhatti VM on the host, ala Docker volumes?
Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey 'software engineer', how much of the output of an LLM it's actually reproducible vs the one from a calculator or any programming language with the same input in different sessions?
Why are you so concerned about the LLM producing the exact same code across different sessions? Seems like a really weird thing to focus on. Why aren't you focused on things like security, maintainability, UI/UX, performance?
Comp-sci people like repeatability when they want that and true randomness when that is desired. Things in between are rarely desired.
In computing, things are much more useful when they behave in predictable ways. Even AI, many (most?) would argue.