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

Category: devtools

Tags: virtualization, sandbox, cli-tool, rust, microvm

Score: 7.5/10 (Innovation: 7, Technical: 8, Documentation: 8, Utility: 7)

smolvm is a CLI tool for creating and running lightweight, hardware-isolated virtual machines with sub-second cold starts and portable single-file artifacts. It's interesting because it combines the security of VMs with the convenience of containers, offering cross-platform support, elastic memory management, and unique features like SSH agent forwarding without key exposure.

Target audience: devops, backend devs, security engineers

Repository: https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm · Rust · Apache-2.0 · 2455 stars

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