Show HN: Sub-millisecond VM sandboxes using CoW memory forking
Sub-millisecond VM sandboxes for AI agents via copy-on-write forking - adammiribyan/zeroboot
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I wanted to see how fast an isolated code sandbox could start if I never had to boot a fresh VM.
So instead of launching a new microVM per execution, I boot Firecracker once with Python and numpy already loaded, then snapshot the full VM state. Every execution after that creates a new KVM VM backed by a `MAP_PRIVATE` mapping of the snapshot memory, so Linux gives me copy-on-write pages automatically.
That means each sandbox starts from an already-running Python process inside a real VM, runs the code, and exits.
These are real KVM VMs, not containers: separate guest kernel, separate guest memory, separate page tables. When a VM writes to memory, it gets a private copy of that page.
The hard part was not CoW itself. The hard part was resuming the snapshotted VM correctly.
Rust, Apache 2.0.
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