An embeddable, portable, branchable virtual machine to safely run Agents locally.
C-Rank Grade: S (Elite) - 72/100
External PR Merge Rate: 76%
Response Time: 20h
First Timer Success: 58%
smol-machines/smolvm has a recorded first-timer success rate of 57.9%. Repositories ranked S typically provide actionable feedback during code reviews and actively nurture new community contributors.
Maintainers in smol-machines/smolvm respond to incoming external pull requests in approximately 19.7 hours on average. Keeping PRs focused on single tasks and ensuring tests pass helps maintainers review faster.
The C-Rank™ system evaluates GitHub projects on a 0–100 scale using real data: PR merge rates, review turnaround time, active maintainer presence, and first-time contributor success. A score of 71.9 places smol-machines/smolvm in the S tier.
The external contributor pull request merge rate for smol-machines/smolvm is 75.7%, based on public PR activity from non-core contributors.
smol-machines/smolvm currently has 2 active issue(s) tagged with beginner-friendly labels like "good first issue", "beginner", or "up-for-grabs".
Highly welcoming maintainers in smol-machines/smolvm. Prompt code reviews with positive guidance for new contributors.
Average Response Latency
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External Acceptance Rate
Percentage of community pull requests successfully merged into main.
First PR Conversion
Rate at which developers submitting their first repository PR succeed.
Show contributors that your repository actively reviews and merges external pull requests.
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Historical health & responsiveness evolution
External PR acceptance
First PR success rate
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Maintainer review activity heatmap & prime window prediction
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Maintainers are most responsive around 00:00 UTC (00:00 UTC in your timezone). Recommended submission window is Monday - Wednesday from 21:00 to 01:00 UTC (21:00 - 01:00 UTC local).
Maintainer Strategy: Maintainer Sweet Spot: PRs under 150 lines merge in ~13 hours (95% approval). Large PRs (>500 lines) take ~95 hours (34% approval). Keep your diff compact for rapid review.
User experience of the smolvm CLI tool could benefit from having a command like smolvm completion <shell> to generate shell completion scripts, as is done in mise completion. This command does not even necessarily need to install these scripts, as that can be left as a configuration exercise for consumers.
On Windows, pack create succeeds and nothing it produces can run. Every way of running the artifact fails on the host while extracting a layer: smolvm.exe pack create --image alpine --output p smolvm.exe pack run --sidecar p.smolmachine -- echo PACK_RUN_OK extract assets: extracting C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\smolvm-pack\<id>\layers\<digest>.tar into ...\layers\<digest> failed, nothing was kept: The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect. (os error 123) The stub's own run and machine create --from p.smolmachine fail with the same message, and so does a pack made with pack create --from-vm. Releases One laptop, one afternoon, the pack cache emptied before each run: release pack create pack run v1.14.6 ok PACK_RUN_OK v1.16.1 ok PACK_RUN_OK v1.18.2 ok os error 123 v1.19.3 ok os error 123 v1.20.2 ok os error 123 v1.21.1 ok os error 123 v1.22.2 ok os error 123 On v1.22.2 it fails the same way for alpine:3.19, alpine:3.20 and busybox. v1.16.2
A cold in-guest pull runs crane manifest, then crane config, then one crane blob per layer, each with its own throwaway DOCKER_CONFIG. Every one of those is a separate Go process paying its own TLS setup and a full anonymous token exchange through the guest network. Instrumented stage timers on a cold 2MB single layer busybox pull, measured in the guest: [pull] manifest 1136ms [pull] config 2879ms [pull] layers 7181ms [pull] barrier 7200ms About 95 percent of a 7.2s pull was process and auth overhead for 2MB of data. This is the per-request half of the same tax #1512 removed on the host side, and the seed builder pays it on every cold image. A cold pull (no cached layers) can fetch everything through one crane pull into an OCI layout: one process, one token, every blob. Pulls that reuse cached layers keep the per-blob path so nothing already on disk is ever re-downloaded. PR incoming. Interleaved A/B in fresh machines: busybox 11.8s to 5.3s under high registry latency, and on a q
Summary I ran into what looks like significant temporary-storage amplification when packing a VM created from a large OCI image. The VM could be created, booted, and provisioned successfully, but the final pack operation failed while staging the source filesystem. The source OCI archive was approximately 18.4 GB compressed and expanded into a much larger filesystem. Environment SmolVM: 1.14.2 Host: Linux x86_64 with KVM Source: large Ubuntu runner OCI image Compressed source archive: 18,378,657,280 bytes VM storage configurations attempted: 120 GiB, 190 GiB, and 220 GiB Image and reproduction The image comes from our runner-image snapshot project: https://github.com/preloopdev/runner-image-blobs The exact image used was: ghcr.io/preloopdev/runner-images:ubuntu24-runner-large-latest@sha256:4f7e4be438e4eb9c0f23bebdec12cf1d25520876ad2052412ba18580919b7795 A direct SmolVM reproduction should look roughly like this: IMAGE="ghcr.io/preloopdev/runner-images:ubuntu24-runner-large-latest@sha
Drawing inspiration from the GraalVM JDK directory structure, I suggest placing all executable files—such as smolvm and smolvm-bin—in a bin directory. Template and configuration files—such as storage-template.ext4.zst and overlay-template.ext4.zst—should be placed in a conf directory. The root directory should be reserved solely for informational files, such as README.txt and LICENSE.txt. This approach ensures a clear directory structure and facilitates easier management. smolvm-1.13.0-darwin-arm64 directory layout: 0755 drwxr-xr-x@ - . 0755 drwxr-xr-x@ - ├── agent-rootfs 0755 drwxr-xr-x@ - │ ├── bin 0755 drwxr-xr-x@ - │ ├── dev 0755 drwxr-xr-x@ - │ ├── etc 0755 drwxr-xr-x@ - │ ├── home 0755 drwxr-xr-x@ - │ ├── lib 0755 drwxr-xr-x@ - │ ├── media 0755 drwxr-xr-x@ - │ ├── mnt 0755 drwxr-xr-x@ - │ ├── opt 0555 dr-xr-xr-x@ - │ ├── proc 0755 drw
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When evaluating whether to contribute to smol-machines/smolvm, response velocity and maintainer engagement are crucial. GetMerged continuously tracks pull request trajectories, first-comment latency, and code review rounds to help developers avoid submitting pull requests to backlogged repositories.
Currently, maintainers of smol-machines/smolvm acknowledge new external contributions in approximately 19 hours. Out of all submitted pull requests from non-core authors in the last 180-day window, 75.7% were successfully merged into the primary branch.
smol-machines/smolvm has a recorded first-timer success rate of 57.9%. Repositories ranked Elite typically provide actionable feedback during code reviews and actively nurture new community contributors.
The initial maintainer response time averages ~19 hours. Keeping PRs scoped to single concerns and ensuring CI checks succeed will optimize review turnaround.
The C-Rank™ index scores repositories on a 0 to 100 scale using an objective formula: external PR merge rates, initial response speed, active maintainer count, and first-time contributor retention. A score of 71.9 places smol-machines/smolvm in the Elite tier.
The external pull request merge rate is 75.7%. GetMerged isolates non-core community contributions so external developers get an accurate benchmark of PR acceptance probability.
Yes, smol-machines/smolvm currently has 2 active issue(s) tagged with beginner-friendly labels. You can inspect these directly from the repository issues tab.
All metrics displayed for smol-machines/smolvm are automatically retrieved via the public GitHub API and recalculated daily. Insider pull requests submitted by repository owners or organization members are excluded from merge rate calculations to preserve objective external contributor statistics.