smol-machines/smolvm

Use smolvm, support for tailscale in each VM. https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm

It depends on your threat model but I think it's a good reminder either way. I recently discovered SmolVM < https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm > and it looks like a pretty good sweet spot for usability and isolation. There are so many sandboxing technologies to pick from and understand. I've been using (rootless) Podman which gives me some basic assurances that it will stay in its designated directory and not run tools on my system directly but I have no limits on the network and with an internal UID/GID of 0:0 I have not done myself any favours. This is the same level of protection one would implement to keep a poorly written bash script from wreaking havoc and that's about it.

…thought what is its point, but this post made me wonder about the fact that I myself don't use sandboxes (even though I very much think that they are a good option and recommend it to other people!) I tried to use smolvm[0] on macOS and although its really great but then it was still a bit of an hassle to install maki.sh and It wasn't an entirely smooth sailing process in the start and I can see why there is some initial friction to it. So I am gonna try it out as well and I think that this might be damn effective at what its trying to solve (simplifying sandboxing to be the norm rather than the exception) For example. Even within Smolvm, I had to install maki (debug the issues in install…

You can even go a step further and run the container in a VM, such as with Docker Sandbox or the krun runtime in Podman. There's also smolvm which is a nice minimal microvm manager based on libkrun: https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm . I vibe coded a little shell utility for building and running OCI images for the Pi harness using it (easy enough to do manually, but the automation just makes it a couple quick commands rather than digging through documentation): https://github.com/neuroblaze/smol-pi

Kernel-level isolation is a significant security differentiator, for starters. https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm#comparison shows a good comparison table.

How "fat" are the packed machines? In other words, how much bloat is inevitable, or is that entirely controlled by the base image + the user's smolvm machine spec? How does smolvm's pack compare to something like dockerc [0] in terms of speed and size? Disclaimer: I just learned about dockerc! I can't actually create and test a pack right now because of [1], but I love the idea of using this to distribute applications you might otherwise use a Docker image for. [0] https://github.com/NilsIrl/dockerc [1] https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm/issues/159