SSH-hypervisor – like SSH, but each user gets their own microVM
This is a project I made over the weekend. What if when you SSH'd into a machine, instead of giving you a user login, it would provision a new microVM just for you? It's like a little SimCity for VMs. This turned out to be a lot of fun, and I've wanted to make my own custom SSH server for a while now, with its fancy progress bars and color animations. The hardest part was definitely debugging VM setup, boot, and networking though! Compiling the Linux kernel with all the right configs was difficult. For a while I had issues with silent hangs on boot due to lack of available system entropy, on…
SSH-hypervisor – like SSH, but each user gets their own microVM launched on September 23, 2025 with 34 votes, #484 of 8,160 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.
In plain words
SSH-hypervisor is a custom SSH server that provisions a lightweight microVM for each user who connects, rather than providing a traditional shell login. Built as a weekend project, it bundles a Linux kernel, Firecracker hypervisor, and networking tools into a single statically-linked binary for x86_64 and aarch64 architectures. The creator focused on custom features like progress bars and animations while working through challenges around VM boot, kernel configuration, and system entropy. It's designed for anyone interested in exploring virtualization, custom SSH implementations, or experimenting with isolated user environments.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Tackling a larger systems programming project with AI tools.
Eric Sep 23, 2025 10 1 Share This weekend I tried to make a hypervisor hooked up to SSH . It’s like: ssh <YOUR_NAME>@vmcity.ekzhang.com But every time someone logs in with a different name, instead of being a user on the host machine, it greets you and then spins up a virtual machine with Firecracker . $ ssh [email protected] Hello, eric! 🌸 Today is Sunday. It's your first time here. Recent logins: ┌─────────┬──────────────┐ │ User │ Last login │ ├─────────┼──────────────┤ │ matthew │ 2 hours ago │ │ kathy │ 4 hours ago │ │ linus │ 16 hours ago │ │ sen │ 4 days ago │ └─────────┴──────────────┘ Booting up your fresh VM: 💡 ▮▮▮▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯ 25% If you haven’t logged in for a while, we…from ekzhang.substack.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
This is a project I made over the weekend. What if when you SSH'd into a machine, instead of giving you a user login, it would provision a new microVM just for you? It's like a little SimCity for VMs. This turned out to be a lot of fun, and I've wanted to make my own custom SSH server for a while now, with its fancy…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
Sub-millisecond VM sandboxes using CoW memory forkingMar 2026 · github.com · ▲311I wanted to see how fast an isolated code sandbox could start if I never had to boot a fresh VM. So instead of launching a new microVM per execution, I boot Firecracker once with Python and numpy already loaded, then snapshot the full VM state. Every execution after that creates a new KVM VM backed by a `MAP_PRIVATE` mapping of the snapshot memory, so Linux gives me copy-on-write pages automatically. That means each sandbox starts from an already-running Python process inside a real VM, runs the code, and exits. These are real KVM VMs, not containers: separate guest kernel, separate guest…
- SAShhhbb, an SSH BBS2023 · donuts-are-good.github.io · ▲188
Hello all :) I made this BBS for fun and thought you all would enjoy it. It's not perfect, but it's been a fun exercise! see it: https://asciinema.org/a/Emg6SWrXMV6cehfQxrw1GRu75 try it: ssh -p 2223 shhhbb.com host it: https://github.com/donuts-are-good/shhhbb/releases/latest why? Every year I challenge myself in some new way, this year it is to push one project per week. You might recognize my static site generator [0] or my releaser for go [1] from previous posts as one of these weekly projects. If you want to join me in doing this, it's…
microvm – a minimalist machine type for QEMU inspired by Firecracker2019 · github.com · ▲145
Wiser – minimal hypervisor boots Linux VM, written in C2021 · github.com · ▲136:racehorse: Extremely minimal vmm for linux written in C. Hopefully someday will spin linux-vm for you. - flouthoc/wiser
A small virtual machine written in C2014 · github.com · ▲212"interesting" VM in C. Let's see how this goes. Contribute to tekknolagi/carp development by creating an account on GitHub.
More work this month
the category →
Endless lofi beats composed live in your browser, over pixel-art nights in Paris, Tokyo, New York, Hong Kong, Sydney, San Francisco and more. Free, no sign-up.
Work · 25d ago · loficities.com
Smooth Recorder▲257Mac screen recordings that look edited when you hit stop
Work · 19d ago · smoothrecorder.com
Work · 13d ago · readrare.com
Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
Launched alongside, September 2025
the whole month →
The site hit #1 on HN about a year ago. Got enough traffic that I turned it into a proper API. What's there: - REST API — 35k products, manually filterable by category, free key, 60 req/min - CLI — npx anycrap random -c food - faker.js plugin — bundled, no API call, works offline - HuggingFace dataset — full 35k rows for ML/training https://anycrap.shop/developers
AI · 2025 · anycrap.shop
I made a built-from scratch Wayland Compositor to display any GUI app* in the terminal! I think there is a lot of unexplored potential in custom Wayland compositors, a lot of really cool things you can embed existing applications into! So, I started with embedding apps into the terminal because that is the easiest input/output (output is just utf-8 and I use the great `chafa` library for that, and I just read from stdin for the input). If you have any other ideas for cool Wayland compositors, let me know. I purposedly wrote 80% the app in Typescript to appeal to the most developers and…
Dev tools · 2025 · github.com
- IR
Years ago I stumbled across a basic version of this concept and it stuck with me. I knew if I was ever going to take on such a project, it would need to be flawless, but without coding experience it was just another idea that would never happen. By the end of 2024, as AI coding tools exploded everywhere, I finally had a way to make it real. I started from zero knowledge and spent months collaborating with AI agents as a learning experience. Every pixel and every function went through me. The AI translated what I asked for into code, but every decision was human. I didn't use existing OS…
AI · 2025 · mitchivin.com
