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- Jerboa Desktop 0.56.0 is available for Windows and macOS, with the same engine version bundled on both platforms.
- Registry:
jerboa login, logout, tag, push and pull work against registry.jerboa.dev and its hub. jerboa login signs in with GitHub through the registry, which runs the device flow itself. jerboa registry pat manages personal access tokens for CI, with an expiry, namespaces and an optional delete permission. jerboa registry repo edit sets a repository's description and README; tags and repositories are deleted on the hub.- Images are reproducible and host-independent and are built compact by default;
disk_size is applied when the VM starts. Every build is recorded as a recipe (jerboa images recipe). - Runtime packages are reproducible archives identified by a content digest, from a signed package index the client verifies before use. Downloads resume after an interruption.
- Linux kernel toolset v0.2.3: mkfs produces byte-identical images on every host, accepts host paths longer than 255 bytes and is published for every host platform.
- Native macOS runtime: block requests run on worker threads, network frames keep backpressure, and links between VMs on the same Mac go direct. Oversized network frames are dropped instead of stopping the VM.
- Security: the daemon API uses a mutual challenge handshake, so the token never crosses the connection; build steps run in a sandbox (bubblewrap on Linux,
sandbox-exec on macOS); guests are confined to Jerboa-managed IPv4 networks and cannot reach the host's loopback. - The CLI and
install.sh refuse a release manifest older than one already accepted. install.sh --version needs that version's signed release manifest, so it installs v0.56.0 and later. - Upgrade notes: restart the daemon after upgrading (
jerboa daemon restart); image ports publish on 127.0.0.1 unless -p says otherwise; VMs need a network from jerboa network create; [build] run has no network unless [build] network = true; compose volumes are scoped to their file; run jerboa sign again for signatures. The full list is in the release notes on GitHub.
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- Jerboa Desktop 0.55.1 is available for Windows and macOS, with the same engine version bundled on both platforms.
- Redesigned Jerboa Desktop: a dark interface in the jerboa.dev design system, with Geist type, borders instead of shadows and the jerboa terracotta for the main action of each view and the selected section.
- Lists of unikernels, images, volumes and networks show a loading state until the engine answers, instead of briefly reporting that there are none.
- Dialogs close with Escape, and delete confirmations state that the action cannot be undone.
- Icon-only buttons name what they act on for screen readers (for example "Stop web"), and the CPU, memory and network charts read their colours from the theme.
- The engine, the macOS runtime and the Linux kernel toolset (v0.2.2) are unchanged from v0.55.0.
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- Jerboa Desktop 0.55.0 is available for Windows and macOS, with the same engine version bundled on both platforms.
- Faster networking between VMs: jumbo MTU and larger TCP windows double VM-to-VM TCP on Linux (472 Mbit/s to 1.01 Gbit/s) and raise it 78 % on macOS.
- On macOS, VMs on the same network now talk over direct links, 3.5 times faster than through the switch, and whole TSO frames reach the gateway.
- Published ports on Linux use kernel NAT (nftables) for clients on the same host by default: a Redis guest serves about 45 % more requests than through the userspace proxy.
- New
jerboad --port-publish nat-lan extends kernel NAT to clients on other hosts, as Docker does, and opens nftables, firewalld and iptables forwarding for those ports only. It is opt-in because forwarded connections skip the host's INPUT rules; see Published ports on Linux in the CLI reference. - Linux installs Firecracker v1.17.0, and the guest kernel now reads its command line from the PVH start info that Firecracker 1.12 and later use.
- Firecracker drives on Linux use the async (io_uring) engine by default when the host supports it, and 2 MiB huge pages when they are reserved: random reads are about 5 times faster than Docker's on the same host.
- Storage durability: written blocks become visible only after their data is flushed, freed space is reused only once its release is durable, and a full volume now returns ENOSPC instead of failing with I/O errors.
- New volumes use a page map per extent, so a first sequential write no longer zero-fills 32 MiB at a time. Existing volumes keep their format.
- Fixed a data loss with Firecracker's async engine when a write raced the conversion of a new extent, and fewer device flushes when storage is released.
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- Jerboa Desktop 0.54.3 is available for Windows and macOS, with the same engine version bundled on both platforms.
- Fixes for problems found by running a full benchmark battery against v0.54.2: guest memory corruption, stalled disk I/O, incomplete network transfers and lost IP leases.
- Writeback memory is bounded, and truncating a file no longer races with pending writes.
- Named volumes are owned by the daemon, with a one-time migration of older volumes, and every
jerboa volume command now reaches the WSL2 daemon on Windows. - The Linux daemon can bind the DNS port for service discovery, and images include the glibc runtime libraries they need.
- Fixed a boot failure under Firecracker 1.16 caused by the PVH entry using its stack before setting it up.
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- Jerboa Desktop 0.54.2 is available for Windows and macOS, with the same engine version bundled on both platforms.
- Faster startup: a VM now clones its boot disk instead of writing a full copy of the image on every start. A 1 GiB image is ready in 359 ms, down from 635 ms.
- Smaller images: the boot partition is sized to what it holds, and a new compact layout drops the boot code and the second copy of the kernel for Firecracker and native macOS. A hello-world image goes from 8.0 MiB to 4.0 MiB.
- Durability fix: volumes on Firecracker now forward the guest's flushes to host storage, so a database commit survives a host crash as it already did on QEMU.
- Stopping a Firecracker VM on Linux is now immediate instead of waiting 30 seconds for a shutdown request the guest never receives.
- New run options
--disk-io-engine sync|async and --volume-cache writeback|unsafe for storage tuning. jerboa build --layout compact builds the smaller image, and --size-report shows what fills an image, grouped by program, package, npm module and Python distribution.[build] include in unikernel.toml limits which project files are packaged.- New
jerboa-bench tool compares hypervisor backends and Docker on the same binary, with repeated randomized runs; see the Benchmarks page in the docs. jerboad --vm-disk-dir chooses where per-VM boot disks live, and --fc-metrics-dir records Firecracker device metrics for storage profiling.
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- Native macOS on Apple Silicon (development preview): the CLI, daemon and VMs run directly on macOS 26+ through Hypervisor.framework, with no Linux VM in between.
- Jerboa Desktop for macOS ships as a self-contained DMG with the bundled Firecracker runtime; QEMU is optional and enables explicit x86 emulation with
--emulate-x86. - Firecracker snapshots on macOS:
jerboa snapshot create and jerboa snapshot restore pause and resume a VM in place for fast local development. - Linux ARM64 packages:
jerboa pkg create --platform linux/arm64 with local sysroots and --map, platform-aware pkg from-docker, and package provenance in jerboa images inspect. - macOS networking publishes TCP and UDP ports without
--network, supports named networks with guest DNS, and denies Firecracker outbound traffic unless a policy allows it. - Compose accepts network attachments with
ipv4_address and aliases. - Project files now take precedence over package files at the same image path, so builds such as
examples/postgresql no longer fail with a collision. - Clearer errors when building a macOS or Windows binary instead of a Linux ELF, and when requesting x86 emulation on Firecracker.
- The installer supports pinned versions and more reliable Linux upgrades.
- Stabilized ARM64 secondary CPU start-up in the kernel.
- New user guide for macOS at docs.jerboa.dev.
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- Addressed findings from the v0.51.2 audit.
- Optimized boot image verification to use a single pass.
- Fixed kernel boot end-to-end tests.