Show HN: We Put Chromium on a Unikernel (OSS Apache 2.0)

#1

Post by juecd » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 1:19 PM UTC

We’ve been building infrastructure to spin up browsers for AI agents. Originally, we built[0] it as a pool of warm Docker containers running Chromium, exposing:

- Chrome DevTools Protocol (for Playwright/Puppeteer)

- noVNC (for live view)

We’ve been following the unikernel space for a while, so we decided to see if we could get our image on one. We went with Unikraft Cloud[1]. Here’s how it did:

- Boot-up time: 10–20ms (vs. ~5s for Docker containers)

- Near 0 CPU/memory consumption when idle

- Still ~8GB RAM when active (headful Chromium)

Potential use cases:

- Standby mode during long-running jobs: unikernels can sleep after X sec of inactivity, reducing clock time costs

- Session reuse: auth/session cookies persist for hours/days. Basically as long as the cookies are valid

- Cold start speed: good for low-latency, event-based handling

We open sourced it with Apache 2.0! Feel free to fork or submit an issue / PR. Open to feedback or suggestions. www.github.com/onkernel/kernel-images

==

[0] https://github.com/onkernel/kernel-images

[1] https://unikraft.cloud/

[2] Thanks to the Unikraft Cloud team @fhuici @nderjung @razvandeax for helping us figure this out (we're not affiliated)

[3] (OPs) @rgarcia @juecd

Show HN: We Put Chromium on a Unikernel (OSS Apache 2.0)
github.com

Re: Show HN: We Put Chromium on a Unikernel (OSS Apache 2.0)

#2

Post by juecd » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 1:29 PM UTC

(OP) Happy to answer any questions! Some things we're still exploring:

- Mounting persistent storage for file i/o

- Replacing noVNC with a faster alternative

Would love feedback, especially if you’ve worked on fast-cold-start systems or unikernel-based infra.

Re: Show HN: We Put Chromium on a Unikernel (OSS Apache 2.0)

#3

Post by jay-barronville » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 2:56 PM UTC

Impressive work, @juecd!

Re: Show HN: We Put Chromium on a Unikernel (OSS Apache 2.0)

#4

Post by juecd » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 2:57 PM UTC

jay-barronville wrote: post #3

Impressive work, @juecd!

Thank you!

Re: Show HN: We Put Chromium on a Unikernel (OSS Apache 2.0)

#5

Post by shaqbert » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 2:57 PM UTC

5s for Docker containers vs 20ms now ... holy moly, this is fast

Re: Show HN: We Put Chromium on a Unikernel (OSS Apache 2.0)

#6

Post by rollcat » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 2:58 PM UTC

Interesting work. It immediately brought boot2gecko to my mind. If I understand unikernels correctly - do you think it would be viable to run this on real HW?

Re: Show HN: We Put Chromium on a Unikernel (OSS Apache 2.0)

#7

Post by shykes » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 2:59 PM UTC

This looks excellent, and very fun to play with!

I used this one-liner to run an instance directly from remote source:

  dagger -c 'git https://github.com/onkernel/kernel-images | head | tree | docker-build --dockerfile containers/docker/Dockerfile | up --ports 8501:8501,8080:8080,6080:6080,9222:9222'

Be aware that the initial docker build is quite long... But caching kicks in for subsequent runs.

I look forward to playing with this!

Re: Show HN: We Put Chromium on a Unikernel (OSS Apache 2.0)

#8

Post by juecd » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 3:07 PM UTC

shaqbert wrote: post #5

5s for Docker containers vs 20ms now ... holy moly, this is fast

From what we've seen, micro VMs could probably do something very fast too (150ms?) but we thought 20ms was pretty crazy.

Re: Show HN: We Put Chromium on a Unikernel (OSS Apache 2.0)

#9

Post by tyre » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 3:43 PM UTC

This is super cool. We’ve been looking into infra for AI agents. As others have noted, the difference in speed alone between docker and this is a huge win. Having our clients wait around for five seconds really adds up.

Awesome tech, excited to dig deeper for healthcare

Re: Show HN: We Put Chromium on a Unikernel (OSS Apache 2.0)

#10

Post by capiki » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 3:51 PM UTC

Cool (and congrats on the demo)! Sounds like a promising approach. I work on browser use agents and one of the most difficult problems now is bot detection. Curious if you know how this impacts bot detection/fingerprinting?