Show HN: Smol machines - subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines
A new open source project called "smol machines" has been released, promising portable virtual machines with sub-second cold start times. The project aims to provide lightweight, fast-booting, and isolated environments suitable for serverless functions, CI/CD runners, and other ephemeral workloads. It leverages a custom hypervisor to achieve its performance goals while maintaining portability.
MY TAKE
Sub-second VM cold starts could challenge the dominance of containers for many serverless and edge use cases, offering stronger security isolation without the typical performance penalty. This is an exciting project to watch for anyone working in cloud infrastructure.
"Show HN: Smol machines - subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines" from Hacker News (https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm) [Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:18:58 +0000]