Show HN: We Put Chromium on a Unikernel (OSS Apache 2.0) https://ift.tt/CvnHPrY

Show HN: We Put Chromium on a Unikernel (OSS Apache 2.0) We’ve been building infrastructure to spin up browsers for AI agents. Originally, we built[0] it as a pool of warm Docker containers running Chromium, exposing: - Chrome DevTools Protocol (for Playwright/Puppeteer) - noVNC (for live view) We’ve been following the unikernel space for a while, so we decided to see if we could get our image on one. We went with Unikraft Cloud[1]. Here’s how it did: - Boot-up time: 10–20ms (vs. ~5s for Docker containers) - Near 0 CPU/memory consumption when idle - Still ~8GB RAM when active (headful Chromium) Potential use cases: - Standby mode during long-running jobs: unikernels can sleep after X sec of inactivity, reducing clock time costs - Session reuse: auth/session cookies persist for hours/days. Basically as long as the cookies are valid - Cold start speed: good for low-latency, event-based handling We open sourced it with Apache 2.0: github.com/onkernel/kernel-images Thanks to the Unikraft Cloud team @fhuici @nderjung @razvandeax for helping us figure this out (we're not affiliated) - @rgarcia @juecd == [0] https://ift.tt/DbC0wQV [1] https://unikraft.cloud/ https://ift.tt/DbC0wQV April 16, 2025 at 06:19AM