Unrelated: I clicked your user profile and wondered what that keybase.io thing was... turns out your proof expired and should no longer be trusted. :P

"That identity proof for <name> is pending, revoked, or non-existent".

It looks like OP only has an account here to self-promote, which also puts them in the same credibility tier as an advertiser.

I hate how I feel about this: the sole contributor's account is not 2 month old, and yet they have created an org for this project, with all the bells and whistles in the README.

To me, a project that young, with a unique developer at the helm, cannot look "that nice", so I can't resist seeing it as too nice to be true, and being actually a scam or whatever.

I know that, thanks to AI, a solo dev can not only orchestrate an actual projects in a few days, but can ALSO take time to make a good looking README.

When, in the past, the focus was first on the code, then on the README.

Ps: I fear the day keyboards will ship with a "—" button, so we can no longer easily identify AI generated text.

Looks like everyone is converging on the same idea these days :-)

You might be interested in my project then: https://github.com/virtkit-dev/virtkit (also inspired by smolvm and similar projects). Default kernel included, but can also boot a custom kernel if necessary.

I built it at work to replace years of accumulated tooling around complex multi-stage docker/docker-compose builds. The same workloads now run more securely, often faster, and with much less disk space. Also acts as a Gitlab executor to run CI jobs in microvms :-)

Obviously built with AI (this would otherwise have been a multi-year effort... and therefore not exist at all!) but I think the design is not bad.

Still beta and under-documented, but already quite usable.

Edit: it's not just a runtime, it also replaces docker build with its own native build engine — the build steps themselves run inside microVMs (not "docker inside a VM"). I haven't seen any other tool actually do that, that's quite fun ;-)

I think `smolvm` may fit the bill? I've been using it to run pi.dev in a sandbox.

https://smolmachines.com/

We will be soon including this in Tarit, a firecracker alternative https://github.com/instavm/tarit

Currently we have to supply a kernel to run the OCI as a microVM with a warm pool.

  TARIT_KERNEL=/path/vmlinux

  taritd image build --oci ubuntu:24.04 --name ubuntu
  taritd vm create --image ubuntu

You can do this with libkrun. I use it as a podman backend which works exactly as you describe here.

    podman run --rm -it --runtime=krun ubuntu sh

The kernel/initrd come from a regular OCI container image — there's no separate VM image format. Any OCI image containing /boot/vmlinux (and optionally /boot/initramfs.cpio.gz) works as a kernel image.