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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 PufPufPuf on Friday April 17, 2026 @03:33PM (#47809699)
Hey this is super cool. I've been researching tech like this for my AI sandboxing solution, ended up with Lima+Incus: https://github.com/JanPokorny/locki

My problem with microVMs was that they usually won't run docker / kubernetes, I work on apps that consist of whole kubernetes clusters and want the sandbox to contain all that.

Does your solution support running k3s for example?

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Re:Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable vi... by fqiao on Friday April 17, 2026 @04:31PM (#47810250)
we will evaluate. I created this issue to track this: https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm/issues/150

Really appreciate the feedback!

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Re:Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable vi... by mkagenius on Saturday April 18, 2026 @04:00AM (#47814091)
With instavm (https://instavm.io), you can provide an OCI image built from a dockerfile.
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Re:Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable vi... by PufPufPuf on Wednesday April 22, 2026 @05:55PM (#47869794)
That's not the same as running the docker daemon in the sandbox.
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Re:Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable vi... by jaytheseveloper on Sunday April 19, 2026 @03:03AM (#47822348)
Curious what prevented you from running docker in a microvm? I've successfully run docker in qemu and firecracker microvms.
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Re:Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable vi... by fqiao on Monday April 20, 2026 @10:33PM (#47843849)
So we originally just wanted the vm to be light-weight and can start fast, so we removed docker. @binsquare has a change later to add docker back.
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Re:Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable vi... by PufPufPuf on Wednesday April 22, 2026 @05:55PM (#47869787)
I've been experimenting with krunvm and there the init system is weird. Didn't evaluate firecracker since it doesn't support macOS hosts.
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