SwiftBoot
Your app, your kernel, zero overhead — an OCI container fused with a minimal kernel into one sealed image that boots in 30 ms.
30 ms
Cold boot, cloud and bare metal
App = OS
One sealed, bootable image
Immutable
Signed, reproducible, no mutable host
A mutable host under every container.
Every container still runs on a general-purpose host it does not control: a mutable OS probing hardware and starting services the workload will never use, shared with noisy neighbours, carrying a runtime attack surface the app never asked for. And scaling to zero only pays off if scaling back up is instant — a stock image spends its cold boot on work the app will never use.
The image is general because it does not know what it will run. When the application is known at build time, the host, the wasted boot and most of the attack surface are all removable.
Kernel, image, toolchain.
01
SwiftBoot — the minimal kernel
The core is a Linux kernel — a fork with an overlay-based, reproducible config system laid over the kernel’s gitroot — composed for one OCI application: only the drivers, subsystems and init that workload needs, and nothing else in the boot path. It ships per-target configs for QEMU, AWS (Nitro and Xen), Azure Hyper-V, GCP KVM and Apple Virtualization (AVF), on both x86_64 and arm64.
02
Popcorn — the app as the OS
Popcorn fuses that kernel with your container into a single sealed, bootable image: the app is the operating system. Immutable and signed, with no mutable host and no separate runtime to schedule, it boots in 30 ms across AWS, Azure, GCP and bare metal. See swiftboot.dev.
03
Popper — the VMM
Popper is a lightweight virtual-machine monitor that runs Popcorn images on Apple Silicon (Darwin) with execution times meant to be indistinguishable from a local command binary — while trading process isolation for full VM isolation, a far stronger security boundary. Each VM is described in a single declarative, schema-validated manifest and bootstraps from one verified payload. See popper.os.
Measured, and reproducible.
| Milestone | Status | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| 30 ms cold boot | Running | Internal benchmark, reproducible |
| Multi-target hypervisor configs | Running | AWS · Azure · GCP · AVF · QEMU, x86_64 + arm64 |
| Popcorn sealed-image build | Running | In use |
| Supply-chain attestation + signing | In progress | Build signing |
Figures on this page are targets and internal measurements at proof-of-concept stage. We share the methodology with anyone who wants to run it.
Publish the harness, widen support.
The next milestones are a published boot-time harness anyone can run on their own hypervisor, broader multi-cloud presets, and the Popper toolchain hardened for outside builders.
SwiftBoot spins out of Research ByIQ once the benchmarks are independently reproduced.