The ArcBox Blog.
Engineering deep dives, product releases, and security research from the team building ArcBox.
How We Boot Firecracker VMs in Under 125ms on Apple Silicon
A deep dive into the architectural decisions that let ArcBox Desktop spin up a fully isolated microVM faster than most containers start.
kai, elias
2026-03-05
How We Boot Firecracker VMs in Under 125ms on Apple Silicon
A deep dive into the architectural decisions that let ArcBox Desktop spin up a fully isolated microVM faster than most containers start.
ArcBox Desktop 1.0 is Here
After 18 months of development and hundreds of beta testers, we are shipping the 1.0 release of ArcBox Desktop — the Docker Desktop alternative built for Apple Silicon.
Running OpenClaw Safely: Full Isolation at the Hypervisor Level
AI agents can be unpredictable. Here is exactly how ArcBox uses Firecracker to wall off network, disk, and I/O so a runaway model cannot touch your host machine.
ArcBox vs Docker Desktop: Container Startup Benchmarks
We ran 10,000 container startups across both platforms on an M3 Max. The results were not close.
Full devcontainer.json Support Lands in ArcBox 1.1
Open any VS Code project with a devcontainer spec and ArcBox will spin up the environment automatically — no Docker daemon required.
Why We Open-Sourced Every Line of ArcBox
Real open source means the actual engine, not a README and a screenshot. Here is our commitment to radical transparency and what it means for the community.
Network Isolation in ArcBox: A Deep Dive
Every sandbox in ArcBox gets its own virtual network interface. Here is how we implement per-VM networking with zero host leakage using virtio-net and iptables rules generated at runtime.
GPU Passthrough and Metal Acceleration in ArcBox VMs
We are experimenting with exposing the Apple GPU to Firecracker VMs via Metal API bridging. Early results show 4x GPU throughput for ML inference workloads.