I'm not interested in a VM which supports mounting host filesystems in untrusted Kubernetes pods.

smolvm integrates with k8s (https://smolmachines.com/docs/guides/kubernetes-in-a-microvm...) and can mount s3 buckets (https://smolmachines.com/docs/local/machine-lifecycle-cli-re...).

I wouldn’t dismiss smolvm so fast. It brings together many ideas that make the whole very interesting.

What do you mean by "It doesn’t provide isolation" ? How so ?

This post explains how a GPT agent broke out of qemu VM. It could not break out of firecracker.

https://blog.trailofbits.com/2026/08/26/vms-wont-contain-cyb...

Why? Firecracker mounts very few host systems into the VM, exposing minimal host code to malicious guests. Qemu and smolvm expose much more.

So yeah, smolvm is more like a docker or qemu alternative, definitely useful but NOT relevant to the discussion of sandboxing malicious code

But smolvm provides kernel-level isolation. Much closer to firecracker than docker.

If your networking stack and filesystem and who knows what else are exposed to the guest, its not isolation.

It’s better than Docker, but it can’t be compared to Firecracker at all. Firecracker actually minimizes the attack surface whereas smolvm does not

I thought the whole point of a microVM is that it does provide isolation ?