Brussels / 31 January & 1 February 2026

schedule

smolBSD: boots faster than its shadow!


NetBSD 11 introduces a new MICROVM kernel that can boot in QEMU in about 10 ms, thanks to PVH support, MMIO VirtIO devices, and various low-level optimisations. Building on this foundation, we created smolBSD, a meta-OS and microVM generator that assembles tiny, versatile and fully isolated services using the MICROVM kernel plus selected pieces from NetBSD and pkgsrc. Recent work by Pierre “khorben” Pronchery enables even faster startup by embedding the root filesystem as an initrd-style RAMdisk. This talk presents smolBSD’s design, capabilities, and how it enables ultra-fast, minimal, and reproducible micro-services.

Speakers

Photo of Emile 'iMil' Heitor Emile 'iMil' Heitor
Photo of Pierre Pronchery Pierre Pronchery

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