smolvm
Fewer than 5 people recommend it so far, so there's no written verdict. Here is what commenters said.
Why people recommend it
“I tried to use smolvm[0] on macOS and although its really great but then it was still a bit of an hassle”
“Use your favorite VMM / hypervisor (likbrun, smolvm, microsandbox, etc).”
Show 3 more
“smolvm or microsandbox are great options”
“We use an awesome project called smolvm that builds on libkrun”
“has "smolvm" microvms with better performance and ergonomics and security than docker, you might want to give it a try. (No affiliation, I just like what they're doing.)”
Caveats and dissent
No one in these comments warned against it.
Often compared with
Who recommends it in their own words
From the makers not counted in the ranking
“I focus on being the batteries-included approach for microVMs.”
“a new sandboxing primitive that works locally/remotely to introduce "branchable compute"”
“A lightweight ,portable virtual machine that simplifies/replaces need for containers.”
“a hybrid that combines isolation of VM with speed and flexibility of containers”
“I build a local, cross platform virtual machine for this purpose”
“Author of a free open source alternative to slicer, based on a fork of libkrun”
Threads where it came up
- Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub 2 mentions
- Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026) 2 mentions
- Grok uploaded my user directory to xAI's servers 2 mentions
- Show HN: Pi pod – Run your pi coding agent in sandboxes on your own server 1 mention
- Show HN: Autobox – Make your agents sandbox themselves 1 mention
- Cloud Agents Are Inevitable AI Prisons 1 mention
Also written as SmolVM. Data: smolvm.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 9
“I tried to use smolvm[0] on macOS and although its really great but then it was still a bit of an hassle”
“Use your favorite VMM / hypervisor (likbrun, smolvm, microsandbox, etc).”
“smolvm or microsandbox are great options”
“We use an awesome project called smolvm that builds on libkrun”
“uses smolvm which uses libkrun vmm”
“has "smolvm" microvms with better performance and ergonomics and security than docker, you might want to give it a try. (No affiliation, I just like what they're doing.)”
“that's why you need to use a sandbox.”
“smolvm: https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm”
“How does smolvm's pack compare to something like dockerc [0] in terms of speed and size?”