The discussion centers on Devvm.dev as part of a crowded field of project isolation tools, with users comparing it to established alternatives like smolvm and Docker Sandbox while debating the necessity of microVMs over container-based solutions. Strong disagreement exists regarding security trade-offs, with some arguing that VMs offer superior kernel isolation against malicious agents while others highlight the complexity and resource overhead compared to simpler namespace or container approaches.
79 readable replies · Supporting reply 1 · Supporting reply 2 · Supporting reply 3 · Supporting reply 4microvm-nix
microvm.nix
Nix2022–2025
microvm-nix / microvm.nix
microvm.nix
NixOS MicroVMs
8Distinct people
9Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3.1KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
NixOS MicroVMs
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 9:02:44 AM UTC.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year9 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2022-04-21 13:46:17 UTC to 2025-04-12 18:13:18 UTC.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
3 sourcesOCochoseis·Dec 1, 2022
How are you managing the VM’s on NixOS?
A couple years ago I was searching for a good way to declaratively manage them, and the best I came up with was libvirt + terraform + nixos-generators for images. It feels like you should just be able to set them up as systemd units, but I couldn’t figure it out.
microvm has caught my eye recently but I haven’t played with it yet: https://github.com/astro/microvm.nix
In NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”FWIW, the contemporary alternative to 9p is virtiofs. It is implemented as a separate service that is running aside the hypervisor. Originally out of qemu, it was rewritten in Rust as a freestanding project that can also be used with cloud-hypervisor and crosvm.
https://gitlab.com/virtio-fs/virtiofsd
On NixOS: https://github.com/astro/microvm.nix
In Digging into a QEMU problem of slow data copyingMicrovm.nix: A Nix Flake to Easily Run NixOS MicroVMs on NixOS
2 points · Open discussion