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! Feel free to fork or submit an issue / PR. Open to feedback or suggestions. www.github.com/onkernel/kernel-images

==

[0] https://github.com/onkernel/kernel-images

[1] https://unikraft.cloud/

[2] Thanks to the Unikraft Cloud team @fhuici @nderjung @razvandeax for helping us figure this out (we're not affiliated)

[3] (OPs) @rgarcia @juecd

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43705144

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https://github.com/onkernel/kernel-images