virtle 🐢🪐

Virtle is a VM manager for sandbox workflows.

Status: Beta. Used day-to-day by a few people, feedback appreciated.

Background: Originally designed to be used with agentspace, a NixOS-based sandbox builder, but it virtle has been refined enough to act as a standalone tool.

How does it work?

virtle reads a manifest, starts the required host processes, launches QEMU, waits for guest SSH readiness, attaches an active session with --ssh.

It also handles teardown, QMP-based shutdown, disk-backed suspend/resume, runtime vsock CID allocation, QGA-based remote commands, and more.

Features

• Runs a QEMU microvm.
• Allocates block overlay images.
• Manages virtiofsd daemons for virtiofs mounts.
• Provisions SSH between host and guest.
• Connects over SSH upon boot via signaling.
• Write files between guest and host on boot or shutdown.
• Suspend and resume.
• Notification execution hooks.
• Exposes a virtle.sock for RPC (also usable via virtle rpc sub-command).
• (Experimental) Balloon memory: Auto-adjust memory available to the VM based on internal memory pressure metrics.
• (Experimental) Hotplug: Attach/detach devices during runtime (requires full VM).

Usage

First, write a simple manifest and save it as manifest.toml. See: ./examples/manifest.*.toml.

Global flags:

• virtle [--manifest=MANIFEST] ... - When --manifest is omitted, ./manifest.toml is used by default.
• virtle -v ... - Show useful VM and SSH lifecycle information.
• virtle -vv ... - Show debugging details and output from background commands.

Launch a VM:

• virtle launch [--ssh] [--resume=no|auto|force] [-- <remote-cmd...>]

Other advanced features:

• virtle suspend
• virtle rpc METHOD [JSON_ARGS]
• virtle hotplug ID (experimental)
• virtle hotplug --detach ID (experimental)

Manifest

There are some handy sub-commands for working with manifest files:

• virtle manifest defaults [--resolved]
• virtle manifest validate
• virtle manifest resolve
• virtle manifest schema

Manifest exec arrays render each argv element as a Go text/template. The host process environment is available as .Env on every surface.

Surface	Template values	Injected environment
qemu.exec	HostName, WorkingDir, StateDir, HostOS, HostArch, HostSystem, .Env	none
qemu.fwd_tunnel_exec	Host, Port, .Env	none; QEMU starts the command
ssh.exec	CID, User, Destination, .Env	CID, USER, DESTINATION
mounts[type=virtiofs].virtiofs	Socket, MountSource, MountTag, .Env	SOCKET, MOUNT_SOURCE, MOUNT_TAG
run[].exec	CID, StateDir, Workspace.GuestPath, Workspace.HostPath, user vars, .Env	scalar top-level values only
notifications.exec	State, Message, notification context values, .Env	STATE, MESSAGE, normalized context values

Library

Virtle library docs: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/shazow/virtle

Boot a VM, run a command, tear down:

spec := &vm.Spec{
	Kernel: vm.Kernel{Path: "vmlinuz", Initrd: "initrd.img"},
	Shares: []vm.Share{{Tag: "src", HostPath: ".", GuestPath: "/workspace"}},
	Memory: 2048 * units.Mebibyte,
}
b, err := qemu.New(qemu.Config{
	RemoteControl: qemu.QGA{},
	Logger:        slog.Default(),
})
if err != nil {
	log.Fatal(err)
}
inst, err := b.Start(ctx, spec)
if err != nil {
	log.Fatal(err)
}
defer backend.Shutdown(ctx, inst)

g, err := inst.RemoteControl()
if err != nil {
	log.Fatal(err) // this VM has no guest agent
}
out, err := g.Run(ctx, &vm.GuestCmd{Path: "make", Dir: "/workspace"})
fmt.Printf("exit=%d\n%s", out.ExitCode, out.Stdout)

Optional functionality is discovered by type assertion, as in database/sql/driver:

if s, ok := b.(backend.Suspender); ok {
	err = s.Suspend(ctx, inst, "")
} else {
	err = backend.Shutdown(ctx, inst)
}

Or drive it from a manifest, as the CLI does:

spec, b, err := manifest.Load(f)
inst, err := b.Start(ctx, spec)

License

MIT