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0 pointsbinsquare27d ago0 comments

I am building a virtual machine that starts as fast as containers and can be made portable and easy to use like containers.

free, open source -> https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm

I worked with firecracker a lot back in the day and realized it was a pain to use. And containers had a lot of gotchas too.

Since sandboxing is all the rage now - I think it'd be a better infra primitive than firecracker that works locally/remote and etc.

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jsunderland32327d ago

This is very cool. Would love to chat with you.

I’m working on https://coasts.dev.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the light vm side lately but it’s not an area we are going to attack ourselves. I think there’s a really good pairing between what we’re working on.

cataflutter26d ago

I was going to use Firecracker in an untrusted code execution project (not AI stuff); any chance you'd be happy to elaborate a bit on how you found it a pain to use? Thanks :)

binsquareOP25d ago

firecracker was designed for AWS Lambda and designed to be maintained by multiple AWS teams.

You're likely to experience operational + setup hiccups to use it in production. Just look at their setup docs:

Setup: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/blob/main...

https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/blob/main...

david_shi27d ago

are agents the primary usecase? curious who you think would find this the most helpful

binsquareOP27d ago

Agents, ai code executions are a very good use case.

I think anyone looking to use infra that needs below properties are well served by this project: 1. subsecond vm cold starts 2. kernel isolation (vs containers) 3. consistent local <-> remote environment 4. elastic cpu, memory. 5. ease to setup.

I am designing it as a infra primitive on purpose for general workloads as opposed to others in the microvm space i.e. firecracker was designed for lambda/serverless workloads.

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