What are you actually doing on top of libkrun? Providing really small machine images that boot quickly? If I run the smolvm run --image alpine example, what is "alpine?" Where is that image coming from? Does this have some built-in default registry of machine images it pulls from? Does it need an Internet connection that allows outbound access to wherever this registry runs? Is it one of a default set of pre-built images that comes with the software itself and is stored on my own filesystem? Where are the builds for these images? Where do these machine images end up? ~/.local/share/smolvm/?

i run a custom fork of libkrun, libkrunfw (linux kernel), etc etc: https://github.com/orgs/smol-machines/repositories

Got a lot of questions on how I spin up linux VM's so quickly

Explanation is pretty straight forward.

Linux was built in the 90s. Hardware improved more than a 1000x. Linux virtual machine startup times stayed relatively the same.

Turns out we kept adding junk to the linux kernel + bootup operations.

So all I did was cut and remove unnecessary parts until it still worked. This ended up also getting boot up times to under 1s.

Big part of it was systemd btw.

those images are pulling from the public docker registry.