Coding Agent VMs on NixOS with Microvm.nix

Re:Coding Agent VMs on NixOS with Microvm.nix by alexzenla on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @01:42PM (#46889842)

This is a big reason for our strategy at Edera (https://edera.dev) of building hypervisor technology that eliminates the standard x86/ARM kernel overhead in favor of deep para-virtualization.

The performance of gVisor is often a big limiting factor in deployment.

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Re:Coding Agent VMs on NixOS with Microvm.nix by souvik1997 on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @02:27PM (#46890437)

Edera looks very cool! Awesome team too.

I read the thesis on arxiv. Do you see any limitations from using Xen instead of KVM? I think that was the biggest surprise for me as I have very rarely seen teams build on Xen.

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Re:Coding Agent VMs on NixOS with Microvm.nix by alexzenla on Monday February 09, 2026 @12:44AM (#46941945)

I'd say the limitation has been that sometimes we have to implement things by hand. But it has enabled us to do things that others can't achieve since KVM is a singular stack in many ways. For example, VFIO-PCI is largely the same across all VMMs, but we have true full control over the PCI passthrough on our platform which has allowed us to do things KVM VMMs can't.

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Re:Coding Agent VMs on NixOS with Microvm.nix by yearolinuxdsktp on Thursday February 05, 2026 @12:00AM (#46895851)

How do you compete with Nitro-based VMs on AWS with 0.5% overhead?

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Re:Coding Agent VMs on NixOS with Microvm.nix by alexzenla on Monday February 09, 2026 @12:45AM (#46941951)

When running on bare metal, the CPU performance is within 1%, so usually quite well! Hardest thing is I/O, but we do a lot to help with that too.

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