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Comment by Twirrim | Hacker News Reader

I haven't gone to network filter and logger yet, but I'm running mine in a VM, using lima (https://lima-vm.io/) to make it painless. Works on Mac and Linux, has an untested Windows version.

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What's the difference between lima and conventional fat VM using kvm/virtualbox?

I only heard about smolvm yet and they are YC, so I'm hesitant to use them as they will probably one day pull the rug.

smolvm has better bootup time (<200ms), secrets handling, and egress control compared to lima. Among other things like native branching/forking of the vm itself.

As for the rug pull concern, I'm committed to open source with 2 pieces of evidence.

1. oss license 2. Business model is accruing revenue from offering hosted service + inbound due to the open source project. The business model + open source is aligned.

disclaimer: maintainer of smol machines

Nothing. Lima is a VM running Linux under the hood.

Even easier with https://colima.run/ if you're on MacOS

even better with vms that are built on hvf directly like smolvm or microsandbox. much lighter, and more elastic.

lima uses vz, so it's built on top of hvf, seems perfectly fine and lightweight to me.

vz limits how much you can control the guest memory(doesnt expose a way to do free-page-reporting), has pretty terrible dis/virtiofs performance, and i've had issue with high host cpu usage. that said, iirc colima can switch to a krunkit backend so it can avoid most of these. ymmv but on benchmarks vz was 2-5x worse on a bunch of different ops

Came here to mention Lima. I use a ton, and it’s been great.

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