AI Agents
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All your agents and workspaces in one place — on every device you own.
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View guide →An embeddable, portable, branchable microVM that runs AI agents safely on your own machine.
smolvm is an open-source ai agents project by smol-machines (smol-machines/smolvm on GitHub). It has 6,616 GitHub stars and 324 forks, is released under the Apache-2.0 license, and was last updated on GitHub on 8 October 2026.
Decide which agent or untrusted workload you want to run inside a hardware-isolated VM instead of directly on your host.
Install smolvm with Homebrew on macOS or the install script on macOS and Linux.
Create a machine from an OCI image or a local Docker image, and explicitly allow only the network hosts, mounts and ports it needs.
Run a one-off command in a disposable VM, or start a named machine and exec into it.
Each workload runs in its own VM with its own kernel, built on libkrun, so agent code never runs directly on the host.
Save a running machine mid-execution, rewind it, or branch it into copy-on-write copies that keep running from the same point; checkpoints capture RAM, CPU state and disks.
Pack a configured machine into a single .smolmachine file, push it to any OCI registry, or ship it as a self-contained executable; checkpoints restore on another host.
Networking is off by default and egress can be limited to named hosts; workloads can use a credential without ever reading it.
Run existing images directly, including piping a local image in with docker save — no registry required.
Drive machines from Node/TypeScript (npm install smolmachines), Python (pip install smolmachines) or Rust (cargo add smolmachines).
Clone smolvm to read the source and docs (the CLI itself installs via the script in the next step).
git clone https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm.git
cd smolvmInstall smolvm on macOS with Homebrew, or on macOS/Linux with the official install script.
brew install smol-machines/tap/smolvm
# or: curl -sSL https://smolmachines.com/install.sh | bashRun a one-off Alpine VM with networking enabled, removed on exit.
smolvm machine run --net --image alpine -- uname -asmol-machines maintains smolvm, with documentation and SDKs published at smolmachines.com.
Yes — it is open source under the Apache-2.0 license. The project also offers a hosted smol cloud for restoring checkpoints, which is separate from the local runtime.
No. smolvm is a local VM runtime; it runs whatever images and commands you give it and needs no LLM or cloud API key.
Docker containers share the host kernel; smolvm gives every workload its own kernel in a hardware-isolated microVM, and adds checkpoint, rewind and branching of live machines.
Install the CLI, then run smolvm machine run --net --image alpine -- /bin/sh for an interactive shell in a throwaway VM.
All your agents and workspaces in one place — on every device you own.
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Open-source AI coworkers, each with a computer of their own.
The most-starred other AI Agents projects in the LibreAI catalogue — the realistic shortlist if smolvm is not the right fit.
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Free and open — grab the source, star the repo, and start creating.