Infrastructure●●●Banger
Zeroboot – sub-millisecond VM sandboxes using CoW memory forking
0.79ms VM spawn time beats E2B's 150ms using CoW memory forking on real KVM isolation.
WizardryBig BrainZero to One
adammiribyan
2012mo ago
Back to browse
GitHub Repository
Minimal VMM for multi-tenant dev shells and serverless
326 starsRust
Clone, a small Rust VMM, forks VMs in under 20ms via CoW
by rasengan·Apr 19, 2026·11 points·3 comments
AI Analysis
●●●BangerWizardryBig BrainNiche Gem
Shadow Clone forks VMs in 20ms with container-like memory efficiency.
Strengths
- •Shadow Clone CoW mechanism lets 100 VMs use memory like 10.
- •25K Rust lines, single binary, smaller than most VMM config files.
- •Production deployed at unixshells.com, not just a demo.
Weaknesses
- •Linux-only via KVM, no macOS or Windows hypervisor support.
- •Niche use case—multi-tenant shells won't apply to most teams.
Category
Target Audience
Infrastructure engineers, hosting providers, serverless platforms
Similar To
Firecracker · Cloud Hypervisor · QEMU
Post Description
We needed a secure, multi-tenant way to offer shell accounts to users, but most VMMs were using too much memory and containers are unsafe. With clone, VMs are now more memory efficient than containers in most cases.
Since many other projects on HN looked like they were doing this too, open sourcing this was the right thing to do.
Feel free to use in whole or in part as you see fit!
Similar Projects
Gaming●Mid
Panel Panic a Rust/Macroquad/WASM Panel de Pon/Tetris Attack Clone
Panel de Pon clone in WASM, but genre is solved; missing art assets and polish.
Ship It
LarsDu88
203mo ago
Developer Tools●Mid
A Tcl/TK Clone of the Rust Clone of Microsoft Edit
Tcl/Tk recreation of Edit—but Notepad++, VS Code, and Sublime already own this category.
Cozy
mkovach
403mo ago
Developer Tools●●Solid
Extend MySQL with Rust
pgrx for MySQL, but requires using a fork instead of vanilla MySQL.
Solve My ProblemNiche Gem
deesix
201d ago
Infrastructure●●Solid
VM-curator – a Linux VM manager with easy GPU-passthrough and more
GPU passthrough automation that actually detects your display manager and swaps it back.
Niche GemShip ItWizardry
theYipster
213mo ago
Developer Tools●●Solid
Blocktools – a Rust-powered suite for the smart contract lifecycle
Record command turns manual testing sessions into Foundry test scripts automatically.
SlickSolve My Problem
wazzaaaa
202mo ago