ANantmanler·Nov 5, 2019Submission
Firecracker now supports raspberry pi 4B
92 points · Open discussionfirecracker-microvm
firecracker
Rust2018–2026
firecracker-microvm / firecracker
firecracker
Secure and fast microVMs for serverless computing.
84Distinct people
102Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
38KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Secure and fast microVMs for serverless computing.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- cloud-hypervisor/cloud-hypervisor · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 6:01:08 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year102 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2018-11-27 05:00:35 UTC to 2026-09-30 23:40:36 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 2 | 4 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 14 | 0 | 14 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 27 | 4 | 23 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 2 | 8 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 15 | 0 | 15 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 3 | 4 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 0 | 9 |
What Hacker News says
6 sourcesFirecracker on the RPi4, code now upstream
4 points · Open discussionThis project started off as a side-project on secure code execution because I wanted to figure out Repl.it and HackerRank worked. I tried experiments with different technologies like Firecracker [1], AWS Lambda [2] and gVisor [3]. They are all great technologies but I ended up with a solution using a combination of VMs and Docker containers to execute user generated code.
[1] https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker
[2] https://aws.amazon.com/lambda
[3] https://github.com/google/gvisor
In Show HN: CoderTest – TDD/BDD focused programming interviewsTangentially related, but with even less features: AWS’s Firecracker, a hypervisor with even less features for running containers as VMs: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/blob/mast...
In Nemu – Modern Hypervisor for the Cloud by IntelIt looks like that's missing data - including some very big ones. https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker has quite a few stars and came out in 2018 - no mention. All three of them have contributed to the Linux kernel in significant fashions, and it's not listed for any of them, despite the 72k stars.
And are github repos and stars the only way to measure open source contribution? The Xen project only has 162 stars, yet I don't think anyone would say it isn't an important project, and it's one Amazon has contributed to - if you're using a PV guest on Xen that's protected against Meltdown, chances are high you're using the Vixen mitigation that Amazon released.
Could Amazon do more? Probably. I'm not trying to say they're perfect. But this idea that they don't contribute back to open source seems pretty flawed, even by the data
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in your link, which seems incomplete.
Some background reading that may make this help makes sense to folks from outside the domain: https://www.ozlabs.org/~rusty/virtio-spec/virtio-paper.pdf
Block storage (virtio-block) is way simpler than file systems, both in the virtio implementation and in the host filesystem implementation. Simple is good, both for security reasons and because it makes it easier to reason about performance isolation between guests. The cost is obviously in features, and in making it hard to share data (and very hard to multi-master data) between multiple VMs. To see how simple virtio-block is, take a look at Firecracker's implementation (https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/blob/mast...).
The existing alternative, as the post talks about, is 9p which has a lot of shortcomings, so this is interesting. I suspect it's use is mostly going to be
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in development environments and client-side uses of containers, and server-side users of virtualization will likely stick with block (or filesystem implemented in guest userland).