5 ms·
“microvms” are real vms but the hypervisor and vm (guest kernel) shed most of the hardware / device emulation, support, and discovery which makes traditional VM
by masklinn 2mo ago
“microvms” are real vms but the hypervisor and vm (guest kernel) shed most of the hardware / device emulation, support, and discovery which makes traditional VMs look / feel like real computers, as well as most guest interactions. This gives them extremely low overhead.
Firecracker is designed to start a VM in under 125ms and 5MB. Netbsd advertises that you can direct-boot a MICROVM kernel configuration in under 10ms.
- jsiepkes 2mo agoIf an agent fires up NPM, takes a boatload of memory, is that memory released back to the OS after NPM shuts down in the VM?
- dist-epoch 2mo agoIn principle yes, in practice it's complicated, using something called "balloon drivers" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_ballooning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_ballooning
- masklinn 2mo agoThere’s also memory hotplugging via virtio-mem. But generally speaking downscaling live vm memory can’t be said to be a solved problem, it’s more of an active area of research.
- GautamTalksDev 2mo ago[flagged]
- arendtio 2mo ago> If an agent fires up NPM... :D :D I think this is one of the big issues with today's MCP servers. Most are based on Node.js and take a lot more memory than they should, compared to the complexity that the job requires. Just run a few MCP servers locally, and all your RAM is gone...