Posted by juecd 4/16/2025
- 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
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[0] https://github.com/onkernel/kernel-images
[2] Thanks to the Unikraft Cloud team @fhuici @nderjung @razvandeax for helping us figure this out (we're not affiliated)
[3] (OPs) @rgarcia @juecd
Maybe you can clarify that this is actually running a stripped down linux as unikraft does not have the support to run chrome itself.
Looking forward to one that'll run on my local machine, if I read this correctly?
Can this run inside a Lambda?
It took us 8gb to get it up - maybe could be slimmed down if you took out the Anthropic Computer Use components, but browsers generally are pretty heavy.