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binsquareyesterday at 2:15 PM4 repliesview on HN

So... I'm working on an open source technology to make a literal virtual machine shippable i.e. freezing everything inside it, isolated due to vm/hypervisor for sandboxing, with support for containers too since it's a real linux vm.

The problems you mentioned resonated a lot with me and why I'm building it, any interest in working to solve that together?: https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm


Replies

jFriedensreichyesterday at 2:58 PM

Thanks for the pointer! Love the premise project. Just a few notes:

- a security focused project should NOT default to train people installing by piping to bash. If i try previewing the install script in the browser it forces download instead of showing as plain text. The first thing i see is an argument

# --prefix DIR Install to DIR (default: ~/.smolvm)

that later in the script is rm -rf deleting a lib folder. So if i accidentally pick a folder with ANY lib folder this will be deleted.

- Im not sure what the comparison to colima with krunkit machines is except you don't use vm images but how this works or how it is better is not 100% clear

- Just a minor thing but people don't have much attention and i just saw aws and fly.io in the description and nearly closed the project. it needs to be simpler to see this is a local sandbox with libkrun NOT a wrapper for a remote sandbox like so many of the projects out there.

Will try reaching you on some channel, would love to collaborate especially on devX, i would be very interested in something more reliable and bit more lightweight in placce of colima when libkrun can fully replace vz

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Bengalilolyesterday at 2:32 PM

Probably on the side of your project, but did you try SmolBSD? <https://smolbsd.org> It's a meta-OS for microVMs that boots in 10–15 ms.

It can be dedicated to a single service (or a full OS), runs a real BSD kernel, and provides strong isolation.

Overall, it fits into the "VM is the new container" vision.

Disclaimer: I'm following iMil through his twitch streams (the developer of smolBSD and a contributor to NetBSD) and I truly love what he his doing. I haven't actually used smolBSD in production myself since I don't have a need for it (but I participated in his live streams by installing and running his previews), and my answer might be somewhat off-topic.

More here <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=smolbsd>

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vladvasiliuyesterday at 2:25 PM

What would the advantage of this be compared to using something like a Firecracker backend for containerd?

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fsfloveryesterday at 6:08 PM

It looks like you may be interested in Qubes OS, https://qubes-os.org.

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