---
title: "GitHub - smol-machines/smolvm: Tool to build & run portable, lightweight, self-contained virtual machines."
url: https://daily.dev/posts/github---smol-machines-smolvm-tool-to-build-run-portable-lightweight-self-contained-virtual-mac-ypwlwu4wm
source_url: https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm
type: article
source: "Hacker News"
published: 2026-04-17T19:42:03.620Z
updated: 2026-04-17T19:42:23.326Z
tags: ["rust", "containers"]
reading_time: 5
upvotes: 2
comments: 0
language: en
---

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# GitHub - smol-machines/smolvm: Tool to build & run portable, lightweight, self-contained virtual machines.

**[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 5 min read · 2 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

smolvm is an open-source CLI tool for building and running portable, lightweight virtual machines with sub-second cold starts on macOS and Linux. Each workload gets real hardware isolation via its own kernel using Hypervisor.framework (macOS) or KVM (Linux), powered by libkrun. Key features include: sandboxing untrusted code with network egress controls, packing stateful VMs into a single portable .smolmachine file, persistent development environments, SSH agent forwarding without exposing private keys, and declarative Smolfile configuration. Memory is elastic via virtio balloon, and the tool compares favorably to containers, QEMU, Firecracker, and Kata in terms of portability and macOS native support.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm>

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Tags: [#rust](https://daily.dev/tags/rust), [#containers](https://daily.dev/tags/containers)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/github---smol-machines-smolvm-tool-to-build-run-portable-lightweight-self-contained-virtual-mac-ypwlwu4wm)