Raw capture — raw/smolmachines-com.md

url: https://smolmachines.com/ date_fetched: 2026-08-25

Run any workload in a fast, hardware-isolated Linux VM. The same SDK and the same .smolmachine artifact run identically:

Develop locally, then deploy to the hosted cloud — or self-host with smolvm, open source and 4.6k stars on GitHub.

# install (macOS + Linux)
curl -sSL https://smolmachines.com/install.sh | bash
# Windows x86_64: download the release zip (requires WHP)
# https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm/releases
# for coding agents — install + discover all commands
curl -sSL https://smolmachines.com/install.sh | bash && smolvm --help

# run a command in an ephemeral VM (cleaned up after exit)
smolvm machine run --net --image alpine -- sh -c "echo 'Hello world from a microVM' && uname -a"
# interactive shell
smolvm machine run --net -it --image alpine -- /bin/sh
# inside the VM: apk add sl && sl && exit
# uninstall
curl -sSL https://smolmachines.com/install.sh | bash -s -- --uninstall

sandbox untrusted code — run untrusted programs in a hardware-isolated VM. Host filesystem, network, and credentials are separated by a hypervisor boundary.

# network is off by default — untrusted code can't phone home
smolvm machine run --image alpine -- ping -c 1 1.1.1.1
# fails — no network access
# lock down egress — only allow specific hosts
smolvm machine run --net --image alpine --allow-host registry.npmjs.org -- wget -q -O /dev/null https://registry.npmjs.org

pack into portable executables — turn any workload into a self-contained binary. All dependencies are pre-baked — no install step, no runtime downloads, boots in <200ms.

smolvm pack create --image python:3.12-alpine -o ./python312
./python312 run -- python3 --version
# Python 3.12.x — isolated, no pyenv/venv/conda needed

persistent machines for development — create, stop, start. Installed packages survive restarts.

smolvm machine create --net --name myvm
smolvm machine start --name myvm
smolvm machine exec --name myvm -- apk add sl
smolvm machine exec --name myvm -it -- /bin/sh
smolvm machine stop --name myvm

GPU-accelerated workloads — Vulkan access to the host GPU inside isolated VMs.

smolvm machine run --gpu --net --image fedora:42 -- bash -c '
  /usr/lib64/chromium-browser/headless_shell \
    --no-sandbox --screenshot=/tmp/shot.png \
    --window-size=1920,1080 https://example.com'

Each workload gets real hardware isolation — its own kernel on Hypervisor.framework (macOS), KVM (Linux), or Windows Hypervisor Platform. Pack it into a .smolmachine and it runs anywhere the host architecture matches.

Defaults: 4 vCPUs, 8 GiB RAM. Memory is elastic via virtio balloon — the host only commits what the guest actually uses. libkrun VMM + custom kernel: libkrunfw. No daemon — the VMM is a library linked into the smolvm binary.