The release of the smolBSD toolkit has been published, allowing the creation of specialized minimalist NetBSD builds that include only the necessary set of system components and a fast-booting netbsd-MICROVM kernel. One application of smolBSD is creating trimmed system environments (micro VMs) for running individual server applications in virtual machines. The size of the created base environment is about 10 MB. The service launches in a new virtual machine micro-VMs in about 10 microseconds, which is comparable to the launch speed of containers. The code is distributed under the BSD license. The project is developed by a French community of NetBSD developers.
The mksmolnb utility is used to create environments and can be run on NetBSD, GNU/Linux, and macOS. When built in NetBSD, the resulting system image uses the FFS filesystem, while builds in Linux and macOS use ext2. The project ensures reproducible builds, allowing verification that the distributed binaries are compiled from the provided source code and do not contain hidden changes.
The project provides example scripts for launching the created environments in QEMU and the Firecracker virtualization system, which implements the microVM concept to achieve performance at the level of regular containers while using hardware virtualization based on the KVM hypervisor.
Changes prepared by the project for the direct launch of the kernel manager of virtual machines and for optimizing performance in virtual machines have already been accepted into the main NetBSD kernel and will be available in the NetBSD 11 release. Until the release of NetBSD 11, the optimized kernels are published separately by the project for the x86_64 and i386 architectures.
Source: opennet.ru
