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

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

#71

Post by fqiao »

gavinray wrote: post #26

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

yah, i guess everybody share the experience of "i messed up with my dev env" right? We want this "machine" to be shippable, meaning that once it is configured correctly, it can be shared to anyone and use right away.

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

#73

Post by tomComb »

messh wrote: post #35

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

This sounds great, except for one thing: you can scale your compute (CPU & RAM) as needed but your storage appears to scale with it.

So, if I use a "16 vCPUs, 32GB RAM, 400GB SSD" machine for a period of intense compute, and then want to scale that down to "2 vCPUs, 4GB RAM", most of my storage disappears?

That rather ruins the potential of the advertised scalability.

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

#74

Post by binsquare »

bch wrote: post #33
binsquare wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that was one of my inspirations but I don't think they went far enough in innovation. microvm space is still underserved.

> that was one of my inspirations Colins FreeBSD work or Emiles NetBSD work?

netBSD, I love that focus on a minimal and simple, reproducible binaries.

You'll see that philosophy in this project as well (i hope).

freeBSD focuses on features, which is great too.

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

#76

Post by chwzr »

I see the alpine and python:3.12-alpine images in your cli docs. Where does these come from?is it from a docker like registry or are these built in? Can I create my own images? Or this this purely done with the smolfile? Is there a Ubuntu image available?

Looks really nice btw. Hot resize mem/cpu would be nice. This could become a nice tech for a one-backend-per-customer infra orchestrator then.

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

#77

Post by sureglymop »

topspin wrote: post #45
fqiao wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really appreciate the suggestion! By "live migration", do you mean keeping the existing files and migrate them elsewhere with the vm? Thanks

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.

It's also feasible without network storage, --copy-storage-all will migrate all disks too.

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

#78

Post by RALaBarge »

lacoolj wrote: post #59
binsquare wrote: post #2

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…

What percentage of this code was written by LLM/AI?

[flagged]

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

#79

Post by JuniperMesos »

binsquare wrote: post #2

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…

What were the biggest challenges in terms of designing the VM to have subsecond start times? And what are the current bottlenecks for deceasing the start time even further?

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

#80

Post by binsquare »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #79
binsquare wrote: post #2

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…

What were the biggest challenges in terms of designing the VM to have subsecond start times? And what are the current bottlenecks for deceasing the start time even further?

No special programming tricks were used.

Linux was built in the 90s. Hardware improved more than a 1000x. Linux virtual machine startup times stayed relatively the same.

Turns out we kept adding junk to the linux kernel + bootup operations.

So all I did was cut and remove unnecessary parts until it still worked.

This ended up also getting boot up times to under 1s. The kernel changes are the 10 commits I made, you can verify here: https://github.com/smol-machines/libkrunfw

There's probably more fat to cut to be honest.

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