Published release of the smolBSD toolkit, which allows you to create specialized minimalistic builds of NetBSD, including only the necessary set of system components and a fast-loading kernel netbsd-MICROVM. One of the uses of smolBSD is the creation of stripped-down system environments (micro VMs) for running individual server applications in virtual machines. The size of the created base environment is about 10 MB. Starting a service in a new virtual machine when using such micro-VMs is carried out in approximately 10 microseconds, i.e. comparable to the speed of launching containers. The code is distributed under the BSD license. The project is being developed by the French NetBSD developer community.
The mksmolnb utility is used to create environments, which can be run on NetBSD, GNU/Linux, and macOS. When building on NetBSD, the generated system image uses the FFS file system, and when building on Linux and macOS, it uses ext2. The project provides reproducible builds to ensure that the distributed binaries are built from the provided source code and do not contain hidden changes.
The project provides example scripts for running the created environments in QEMU and the Firecracker virtualization system, which implements the microVM concept to achieve performance at the level of conventional containers when using hardware virtualization based on the KVM hypervisor.
Changes prepared by the project for direct launch kernels by the virtual machine manager and optimization of work in virtual machines have already been accepted into the main part of the NetBSD kernel and will be available in the release of NetBSD 11. Until the release of NetBSD 11, optimized kernels are separately published by the project for architectures x86_64 and i386.