Nether in one page¶
Nether reduces repeated guest startup work by cloning an already warm Linux VM. Boot the guest and application once, capture a base, then restore separate VMs whose memory is backed by that base using copy-on-write.
Each restore still creates a VMM process and hardware VM and sets up its devices. The benefit is avoiding repeated Linux boot and application initialization, not eliminating the cost of each tenant environment.
Where it fits¶
The inspected stack has four layers:
| Component | Responsibility |
|---|---|
| Swerver | Accept requests and route tenant traffic |
| nether-supervisor | Allocate, restore, and reclaim tenant VMs |
| Nether | Execute and control each guest |
| swerver-console | Observe the stack and drive demonstrations |
The gateway, supervisor, and VMs are separate processes. A single-process embedding is a future integration option.
This can support experiments in per-tenant services and isolated code execution. Hardware isolation is one boundary; host device parsing, guest images, resource policy, and lifecycle correctness still determine whether the system is ready for a particular workload.
Evidence and limits¶
Historical HVF results recorded roughly 10 ms to a driveable restored VM and 25 ms to the first response from a warm application on a 512 MiB / 2-vCPU Apple Silicon guest. Complete gateway/supervisor request timings include additional work and have separate measurements. These figures are not throughput or latency guarantees.
The HVF proof scripts also demonstrate parking a guest during an outbound call and continuing the call in a restored VM. A separate host relay holds the upstream connection while the VM is absent. That relay and snapshot storage still consume resources.
Linux/x86 KVM now implements snapshot/COW restore too, but backend features and full-stack verification differ. Nether is pre-1.0, has no external security audit, and does not yet provide multi-host scheduling or durable orchestration and accounting.
See current stack status, the proof index, and limitations for the evidence behind these boundaries.