The Agent-Native Index

agent-native · Code Execution · Verified 2026-10-20

forkd

Listed on The Agent-Native Index

A microVM sandbox runtime for AI agent fan-out

Website ↗ Repo ↗ Full dossier ↗

What it does

forkd is a Firecracker copy-on-write sandbox runtime for AI-agent fan-out. A parent microVM boots once, warms the runtime (imports, JIT, model weights), and is paused to disk. Each child is a separate Firecracker process that mmaps the parent with MAP_PRIVATE, so spawn cost is closer to fork(2) than to a cold-boot VM.

BRANCH pauses a live sandbox, snapshots in-flight state, and resumes so an agent can fork mid-thought — not only at warm-up. v0.4 live BRANCH advertises a 56 ms p50 pause window; v0.5 adds stacked diff-snapshot chains.

Distinct from catalog peers:

Peer Difference
E2B Hosted cold-start cloud VMs. forkd is self-host Firecracker fork-from-warm
CubeSandbox E2B-compatible self-host microVMs (pool / cold-start). forkd’s primitive is CoW fork + live BRANCH
OpenSandbox Runtime abstraction over Docker/K8s/etc.
SmolVM Disposable agent computers (Firecracker/QEMU/libkrun). No fork/BRANCH fan-out primitive
Dormice Cheap-idle E2B-compat daemon, not Firecracker CoW fork

Agent-facing interfaces

How agents onboard

Interaction pattern: CLI + REST / SDK / MCP

curl -sSL https://github.com/deeplethe/sandstorm/releases/download/v0.5.3/forkd-v0.5.3-x86_64-linux.tar.gz \
  | sudo tar -xz -C /usr/local/bin/
sudo -E forkd quickstart

See the full onboarding section in the dossier.

Protocol surface

Interface Detail
CLI forkd quickstart, fork, snapshot, doctor
REST /v1/sandboxes, live BRANCH mode: "live"
Python SDK pip install forkd
TypeScript SDK npm install @deeplethe/sandstorm
MCP pip install forkd-mcp
License Apache-2.0

Verification

Last verified 2026-10-20.

Sources: