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Holos

QEMU/KVM with a compose-style YAML, GPUs and health checks

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I got tired of libvirt XML and Vagrant's Ruby/reload dance for single-host VM stacks, so I built a compose-style runtime directly on QEMU/KVM.What's there: GPU passthrough as a first-class primitive (VFIO, OVMF, per-instance EFI vars), healthchecks that gate depends_on over SSH, socket-multicast L2 between VMs with no root and no bridge config, cloud-init wired through the YAML, Dockerfile support for provisioning.What it's not: Kubernetes. No clustering, no live migration, no control plane. Single host. Prototype, but I'm running it on real hardware. Curious what breaks for people.

HN · launched Apr 20, 2026 · 56 upvotes (top 15%) · 0 views

Niche: os virtualization and vm management software · 61 launches, 1 in the last 7 days ▼ -88% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Horizontal
  • Dev tools
  • Developer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

More like this: all 61 launches in os virtualization and vm management software →

Could you build this?

No Building a custom virtualization orchestrator directly on QEMU/KVM with VFIO GPU passthrough, EFI var manipulation, and L2 multicast networking demands low-level Linux systems programming.

What it would actually take: This project requires writing a systems daemon (typically in Rust, C, or Go) interacting directly with Linux kernel subsystems like VFIO, IOMMU, kvm.ko, tap devices, and OVMF firmware binaries. The hard parts are orchestrating PCI device unbinding/rebinding, managing hardware IOMMU groups safely, configuring per-instance NVRAM states, and managing non-blocking socket-multicast virtual network interfaces. It requires deep expertise in Linux kernel internals, hardware virtualization, and low-level systems programming.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Incus (lightweight QEMU interface), Vagrant (VM provisioning tool), Pulumi with Incus provider, Pyinfra (provisioning), Docker/Docker Compose

Concerns raised: QEMU command-line options change arbitrarily across versions, Managing state in multiple places (Pulumi, Incus, host), Windows/macOS provisioning not yet implemented, No daemon means no easy VM import capability, YAML-based configs encourage DSL hacks instead of proper programming

Feature requests: holos run CLI command (docker run equivalent, not just compose), Windows unattended install support (autounattend.xml), macOS provisioning support, Import existing VMs functionality, Better QEMU version compatibility documentation

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 207 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #34 of 208 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 173 days after the earliest competitor.

Related data

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