BareMetal OS running inside Firecracker microVMs with <1ms cold start

Posted by ianseyler 5 hours ago

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Comment by ianseyler 5 hours ago

BareMetal is an x86-64 exokernel written entirely in hand-coded Assembly. This repo adapts it to run natively inside Firecracker microVMs. No BIOS, no UEFI, no PCI bus - just virtio-net and virtio-block over MMIO.

~800µs cold start in Firecracker on an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395. ~600µs with only networking.

Each microVM can be provisioned with as little as 2MiB of RAM. The kernel binary itself is ~5.5KB - the rest of the kernel image is layout padding to place the monitor and application payloads at fixed memory addresses.