forkd vs tensorlake
fork() for agent microVMs: children fork copy-on-write from a warm Firecracker parent — 100 KVM-isolated VMs in ~100ms, live-VM branching in ~56ms, portable snapshots from a hub. — versus — Serverless platform for agent sandboxes: stateful Firecracker microVMs with snapshots, cloning, auto suspend/resume and network policy, plus fan-out orchestration functions. Python SDK and CLI.
Both make sandbox state forkable: forkd forks copy-on-write children from a warm Firecracker parent on your own KVM hosts, Tensorlake snapshots and clones running sandboxes in its cloud.
| forkd | tensorlake | |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 2.9k | 1.0k |
| Forks | 226 | 148 |
| Language | Rust | Python |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Last activity | 14 days ago | today |
| Topics | sandboxes, agents, local | sandboxes, agents |
| Curated connections | 5 | 4 |
forkd — the curator's take
The sandbox primitive agent fan-out actually wants: instead of cold-booting a kernel per child, a parent VM boots once with your runtime warm (deps imported, model loaded, JVM JITed) and children mmap its memory copy-on-write — so spawning 100 isolated environments costs ~100ms, and v0.4 can BRANCH a live running VM. Tree-search agents, parallel experiment runners and RL rollouts are the natural fits. NOT a managed platform: Linux/KVM only, you operate it, and there's no E2B-style API compatibility — this is a runtime primitive you build on, not a sandbox service you call.
tensorlake — the curator's take
Pick Tensorlake when you want hosted sandboxes that behave like real machines: stateful Firecracker VMs that suspend when idle and resume with memory intact, snapshot and clone mid-run, live-migrate, and take per-sandbox egress allowlists, plus a serverless function runtime to fan out agent work with each function in its own sandbox. This repo is the SDK and CLI; the runtime is Tensorlake Cloud, so it is an API key, not something you self-host. The filesystem benchmark against E2B, Modal and Daytona is their own. Need it on your own hardware? cubesandbox or agent-sandbox. Running one agent's code locally? A container may be enough.