An Update on TinyKVM

6 months ago

TinyKVM was open-sourced in February and now supports running unmodified executables like Deno, Python WSGI, and Lune.
Laurence Rowe's KVM server has become a de-facto CLI for TinyKVM servers.
System call emulation in TinyKVM is minimal, with only 50 real system calls, aiming to avoid shared Linux kernel access.
Per-request isolation in TinyKVM is achieved through two reset modes, balancing speed and memory footprint.
Benchmarks show TinyKVM with Deno has lower p90+ latency compared to native execution, despite resetting the VM per request.
A custom RPC mechanism allows direct function calls between binaries in the same address space, improving performance.
Remote VM calls can be made safely by mapping and unmapping the remote VM just-in-time, with execution times around 2 microseconds.
VM snapshots allow saving and resuming VM states, with a Deno JS hello world instance snapshot being 135MiB on disk.
Cold start times for snapshots are targeted to be faster by preloading only the necessary pages.

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