Novm

novm is an experimental, minimalist virtual machine monitor that explores running Linux guests with a streamlined user-space control plane. Its goal is fast, scriptable VM lifecycle management—boot, snapshot, pause, resume—without the heft of a full cloud stack. The design favors small, understandable code paths around KVM and tap networking so developers can reason about isolation and performance trade-offs. It showcases patterns like process-per-VM supervision, concise configuration, and direct mapping of devices needed for common development workloads. As a research vehicle, novm emphasizes hackability over feature completeness, making it useful for instrumentation experiments, educational deep dives, or bespoke CI sandboxes. Even though it’s not positioned as a drop-in for production hypervisors, it demonstrates how far a lean VM manager can go with modern kernel primitives.