i'm on a mid-level laptop, at times with slow or expensive internet, running ubuntu. i want to be able to run nominally-isolated "copies" of my laptop at near-native speed
1. each one should have it's own network config, eg so i can use wireguard or a vpn
2. gui pass-through to the host, eg wayland, for trusted tools, eg firefox, zoom or citrix
3. needs to be lightweight. eg gnome-boxes is dead simple to setup and run and it works, but the resource usage was noticeably higher than native
4. optional - more security is better (ie, i might run semi-untrusted software in one of them, eg from a github repo or npm), but i'm not expecting miracles and accept that escape is possible
5. optional - sharing disk with the host via COW would be nice, so i'd only need to install the env-specific packages, not the full OS
i'm currently working on a podman solution, and i believe that it will work (but rebuilding seems to hammer the network - i'm hoping i can tweak the layers to reduce this). does microsandbox offer any advantages for this use case ?
> 1. each one should have it's own network config, eg so i can use wireguard or a vpn
This is possible right now but the networking is not where I want it to be yet. It uses libkrun's default TSI impl; performant and simplifies setup but can be inflexible. I plan to implement an alternative user-space networking stack soon.
> 2. gui pass-through to the host, eg wayland, for trusted tools, eg firefox, zoom or citrix
We don't have GUI passthrough. VNC?
> 3. needs to be lightweight. eg gnome-boxes is dead simple to setup and run and it works, but the resource usage was noticeably higher than native
It is lightweight in the sense that it is not a full vm
> 4. optional - more security is better (ie, i might run semi-untrusted software in one of them, eg from a github repo or npm), but i'm not expecting miracles and accept that escape is possible
The security guarantees are similar to what typical VMs support. It is hardware-virtualized so I would say you should be fine.
> 5. optional - sharing disk with the host via COW would be nice, so i'd only need to install the env-specific packages, not the full OS
Yeah. It uses virtio-fs and has overlayfs on top of that for COW.
1. each one should have it's own network config, eg so i can use wireguard or a vpn
2. gui pass-through to the host, eg wayland, for trusted tools, eg firefox, zoom or citrix
3. needs to be lightweight. eg gnome-boxes is dead simple to setup and run and it works, but the resource usage was noticeably higher than native
4. optional - more security is better (ie, i might run semi-untrusted software in one of them, eg from a github repo or npm), but i'm not expecting miracles and accept that escape is possible
5. optional - sharing disk with the host via COW would be nice, so i'd only need to install the env-specific packages, not the full OS
i'm currently working on a podman solution, and i believe that it will work (but rebuilding seems to hammer the network - i'm hoping i can tweak the layers to reduce this). does microsandbox offer any advantages for this use case ?