Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 162 posts

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

#81

Post by indigodaddy »

akoenig wrote: post #46

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!

This looks super awesome. Very excited for you potentially open sourcing it, as I’d like to customize/extend it a bit for certain use cases. Re: smolvm vs in use, I think even if smolvm works great for it, why not keep incus as an option for people who want to use cave on VMs that don’t have access to /dev/kvm (Eg the user can pick either incus or smolvm for their cave deployment)

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

#83

Post by anthk »

RALaBarge wrote: post #78
lacoolj wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

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?

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

#85

Post by weird-eye-issue »

anthk wrote: post #83
RALaBarge wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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?

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

#86

Post by ccrone »

binsquare wrote: post #37
ukuina wrote: post #32

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

sandboxing is one of the features of virtual machines. I'm building a different virtual machine.

Neat! I work with the team on sbx. We built our own cross-platform VMM after running into limitations with the existing options. Happy to chat more about what you’ve built and what we’re doing: christophercrone@docker.com

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

#88

Post by binsquare »

sureglymop wrote: post #75

What I really like about containers is quickly being able to spin one up without having to specify resources (e.g. RAM limit). I hope this would let me do that also.

This does that.

I'm trying to do away the model of cpu and memory tbh.

Virtio- balloon dynamically resizes based on memory consumed.

CPU is oversubscribed by default

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

#90

Post by thepoet »

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…

The images or rather portable artifacts rehydration on any platform plus the packaging is neat. I have been working on https://instavm.io for some time around VM based sandboxes and related infra for agents and this is refreshing to see.
Post reply on HN