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.