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A comment on Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable vi... by harshdoesdev on Friday April 17, 2026 @02:00PM (#47808706)
+1. i built something similar called shuru.run because i wanted an easy way to set up microVM sandboxes to run some of my AI apps, and firecracker wasn't available for macOS (and, as you said, it is just too heavy for normal user-level workloads).
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Re:Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable vi... by sahil-shubham on Friday April 17, 2026 @02:45PM (#47809220)
Nice work on Shuru — I remember looking at it when I was researching this space. You went with a Rust wrapper on Apple’s Virtualization framework right?

I have been working on something similar but on top of firecracker, called it bhatti (https://github.com/sahil-shubham/bhatti).

I believe anyone with a spare linux box should be able to carve it into isolated programmable machines, without having to worry about provisioning them or their lifecycle.

The documentation’s still early but I have been using it for orchestrating parallel work (with deploy previews), offloading browser automation for my agents etc. An auction bought heztner server is serving me quite well :)

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Re:Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable vi... by harshdoesdev on Friday April 17, 2026 @03:24PM (#47809597)
bhatti's cli looks very ergonomic! great job!

also, yes, shuru was (still) a wrapper over the Virtualization.framework, but it now supports Linux too (wrapper over KVM lol)

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Re:Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable vi... by davidcollantes on Saturday April 18, 2026 @04:37PM (#47819328)
Is there a way to store configuration/data of applications running on a Bhatti VM on the host, ala Docker volumes?
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Re:Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable vi... by sahil-shubham on Saturday April 18, 2026 @05:36PM (#47819725)
Yes! Checkout the bhatti volume

They are ext4 blocks which exist independent of sandboxes.

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Re:Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable vi... by davidcollantes on Sunday April 19, 2026 @10:23AM (#47824528)
Wow, that’s quite nice! I see that’s at VM time, any plans to add the ability to add them after the fact? I am really enjoying bhatti!
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Re:Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable vi... by fqiao on Friday April 17, 2026 @02:11PM (#47808859)
Yes, having a light-weight solution for local devices as well is one primary goal of the design. Another one is to make it easy for hosting, self or managed
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