Incubator

Incubator is a lightweight virtual machine manager written in Go on top of QEMU/KVM.

The project was built as a learning platform to understand virtualization internals without relying on higher-level tooling such as libvirt, Proxmox, OpenStack, or LXD.

Features

• Create virtual machines from cloud images
• Launch VMs with cloud-init support
• Start existing VMs
• Stop running VMs
• Destroy stopped VMs
• List managed VMs
• Persistent VM metadata storage
• Automatic disk provisioning using qcow2 backing images
• VNC console access

Design Goals

• Minimal dependencies
• Direct interaction with QEMU
• Simple CLI workflow
• Learn virtualization fundamentals
• Avoid abstraction layers until necessary

Current Architecture

Incubator
    ↓
QEMU
    ↓
KVM
    ↓
Linux

VM metadata is stored locally and used to track:

• Resource name
• VM status
• CPU allocation
• Memory allocation
• Disk configuration
• Operating system image
• Process ID
• VNC port assignment

Example

incubator launch debian

incubator list

incubator stop clever_tesla

incubator start clever_tesla

incubator destroy clever_tesla

Future Work

• SQLite metadata backend
• QMP integration
• Snapshot management
• TAP networking
• Open vSwitch integration
• OVN-backed networking
• Reconciliation loop
• Multi-node orchestration

Disclaimer

Incubator is currently an educational project and should not be considered a production virtualization platform.

Its primary purpose is to explore how modern VM platforms are built from first principles.