Great job with the comparison table. Immediately I was like “neat sounds like firecracker” then saw your table to see where it was similar and different. Easy! Nice job! This looks really cool
Thanks so much
Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines
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Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines
#12Hello, 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…
You could add OrbStack to the comp. table
Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines
#13Give it a try folks. Would really love to hear all the feedbacks! Cheers!
why did you seemingly create two HN accounts?
Edit: I see this appears to be a contributor to the project as well. It was not obvious to me.
Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
@binsquare basically brute-force trimmed down unnecessary linux kernel modules, tried to get the vm started with just bare minimum. There are more rooms for improvement for sure. We will keep trying!
nice! for most local workloads, it is actually sufficient. so, do you ship a complete disk snapshot of the machines?
Yes. files on the disks are kept across stop and restart. We also have a pack command to compress the machine as a single file so that it can shipped and rehydrated elsewhere
Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines
#15Give it a try folks. Would really love to hear all the feedbacks! Cheers!
why did you seemingly create two HN accounts? Edit: I see this appears to be a contributor to the project as well. It was not obvious to me.
this is me: https://github.com/phooq
@binsquare is this one: https://github.com/BinSquare
Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines
#16Hello, 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…
You could add OrbStack to the comp. table
Will do. Thanks for the suggestion!
Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines
#17Hello, 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?
Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines
#18This looks very cool. Does the VM machinery still work if I run it in a bubblewrap? Can it talk to a GPU?
Can you pipe into one? It would be cute if I could wget in machine 1 and send that result to offline machine 2 for processing.
Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines
#19Hello, 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?
Yeah, it's in my mind.
WSL2 runs a linux virtual machine. Need to take some time and care to wire that up, but definitely feasible.
Re: Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines
#20Hello, 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?
Hey, thanks so much! yah we will definitely add windows support later. We are exploring how to get this work with WSL and will release it asap.
Stay tuned and thanks!