GitHub - instavm/tarit: A hypervisor and sandbox cloud for self-hosted AI agents and RL

The fastest hypervisor and sandbox cloud for AI agents and RL environments. Tarit is a microVM platform for secure, fast, ephemeral sandboxes, built for AI agent workloads. It boots a real hardware-virtualized VM in milliseconds, runs a task inside it, and tears it down, giving each sandbox kernel-level isolation instead of a shared-kernel container boundary. It has two parts, developed together in this monorepo:

vmm/ - the Tarit VMM, a minimal rust-vmm based microVM monitor (the hypervisor layer). One process runs one microVM. Usable on its own or under any orchestrator. orch/ - taritd, a multi-node orchestrator and PaaS control plane that launches and manages microVMs across a fleet, with placement, warm pools, networking, snapshots, SSH/PTY access, per-key usage stats, and an audit trail.

They talk over a Unix-domain-socket protocol whose types live in one shared, dependency-light crate, proto/ (tarit-proto). That crate is the wire contract, so you can drive the VMM from taritd or from your own control plane without hand-copying types. Why microVMs

Real isolation. Each sandbox is a KVM guest with its own kernel, not a namespaced process. A compromised or runaway workload cannot see the host or its neighbors.

Layer 2 adds snapshots, suspend, and restore. Layer 3 runs a managed fleet with the orchestrator. Take only the layer you need. You need a Linux host with KVM (/dev/kvm) and a Rust toolchain. Running microVMs needs root (or membership in the kvm group), so the commands use sudo. Layer 1: run code in a microVM git clone https://github.com/instavm/tarit && cd tarit sudo make install # build + install vmm, taritd, and the guest agent sudo make guest # one-time: build a guest kernel + pull an Ubuntu rootfs make guest does the slow work once (kernel build + OCI pull) and writes guest-assets/vmlinux and guest-assets/rootfs.ext4, so starting a VM afterwards is instant. Boot one, run a command in it, tear it down: sudo vmm serve --socket /tmp/vm.sock & sudo vmm --socket /tmp/vm.sock create --kernel guest-assets/vmlinux --rootfs guest-assets/rootfs.ext4 sleep 12 # let the guest boot and dial the agent sudo vmm --socket /tmp/vm.sock exec "uname -a" sudo vmm --socket /tmp/vm.sock stop Only want the hypervisor?

sudo make install-vmm installs just vmm. Layer 2: snapshot, suspend, restore Drive the same socket to capture and move VM state. A full snapshot writes memory plus device state; --diff writes only dirty pages. Suspend releases resident guest RAM; resume brings it back. Restore boots a fresh VMM from a snapshot. sudo vmm --socket /tmp/vm.sock snapshot # full snapshot, prints the .snap path sudo vmm --socket /tmp/vm.sock snapshot --diff # incremental (dirty pages only) sudo vmm --socket /tmp/vm.sock suspend # release resident guest RAM sudo vmm --socket /tmp/vm.sock resume sudo vmm restore --snapshot /path/to.snap # restore into a new VMM process Tarit also does live snapshots: a memory-consistent snapshot of a running guest with no downtime, so a busy VM can be checkpointed or forked. See vmm/docs/STANDALONE.md for the full device, egress, jailer, and PTY surface. Layer 3: run a fleet with the orchestrator taritd manages many microVMs across one or more nodes over an HTTP API, with placement, warm pools, per-key usage accounting, and an SSH/PTY gateway. Single node: cd orch TARIT_API_KEY=$(openssl rand -hex 24) \ TARIT_VMM_BIN=$(command -v vmm) \ TARIT_KERNEL=$PWD/../guest-assets/vmlinux TARIT_ROOTFS=$PWD/../guest-assets/rootfs.ext4 \ taritd serve Then create and drive VMs over HTTP, and scale to

Development also works on macOS for building and cross-checking; running microVMs needs KVM. Not yet implemented: aarch64 guests, virtio-balloon.

Self-hosting Self-hosting has been tested on AWS and GCP. Azure support is coming soon. License Tarit is licensed under AGPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE.