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Capability profile · advanced

Frontier.
For the 1% that can't be WASM.

Frontier is the advanced capability profile of Omega — Firecracker-based MicroVMs for workloads that fundamentally cannot live inside a WASM sandbox. Browsers running V8 JIT, desktops with X11/Wayland, GPU inference with CUDA. It's the kernel boundary you reach for when the kernel boundary is the requirement.

[capability]
Frontier · advanced
[runtime]
Firecracker 1.7
[boots on]
Gaia · Biome
[boots off]
Habitat (WASM only)
Rule of thumb

Use Frontier when
you must.

The default Omega capability is Standard — WASM via Wasmtime. ~99% of workloads we see are well-served by Standard, including most container apps converted via OCI→WASIX. Reach for Frontier when:

  • · You need a JIT compiler that can't run inside WASM (V8, JVM, .NET).
  • · You need a kernel boundary specifically (untrusted multi-tenant code at large scale).
  • · You need GPU passthrough or a graphical desktop with full GL/Vulkan.
  • · You need to host an unmodified Linux VM image (regulatory cargo, legacy systems).
Numbers

Hard isolation
without the cost.

125 ms
boot P50 (snapshot)

Firecracker 1.7 with snapshot resume; cold boot is 380–600ms.

<5 MB
jailer footprint

Statically linked, seccomp-filtered, single CPU thread per VM.

2
architectures

x86_64 and aarch64 guests. KVM-backed on both.

GPU
passthrough

VFIO + IOMMU. NVIDIA, AMD, and Apple Silicon Metal (where supported).

Manifest

Choose Frontier
on a per-brane basis.

// browser farm: V8 JIT requires Frontier, deployed on Gaia
frontier-browser-pool.zgraph.tomlΩ · ZGraph
[brane.browser]
substrate   = "gaia"
capability  = "frontier"
replicas    = 64

[brane.browser.guest]
image       = "noble-aarch64@sha256:7a4f..."
memory_mib  = 2048
cpu_quota   = 1.5
gpu         = "passthrough"

[brane.browser.snapshot]
resume_from = "snap:browser:warm-cdp:b3:9af2"

[brane.browser.network]
egress      = "outbound-only"
allowlist   = ["*.wikipedia.org", "api.openalex.org"]
// annotations

Frontier is a capability flag, not a substrate. Gaia and Biome both accept Frontier branes; substrate = "habitat" with Frontier is rejected at plan time.

guest selects the base image. Snapshots are signed and content-addressed; the boot path is just a content hash + manifest binding.

Operations

Lifecycle
like a unix process.

$ω frontier vms --brane browser --substrate gaia
vm host boot mem cpu state browser.0001 gaia-04 121ms 1.4GiB 0.31 READY browser.0002 gaia-04 124ms 1.6GiB 0.45 READY browser.0003 gaia-09 132ms 1.2GiB 0.18 READY browser.0004 gaia-09 119ms — — RESUMING
$ω frontier snapshot browser.0001 → snap-warm-cdp.bin
✓ paused 4ms · 18MiB raw / 4.1MiB compressed ✓ ed25519 signed · published as snap:browser:warm-cdp:b3:9af2
// rules
hypervisor
Firecracker 1.7 · KVM
snapshot/resume
atomic · signed · content-addressed
GPU
VFIO passthrough · IOMMU required
placement
Gaia or Biome · NEVER Habitat
kernel
hardened minimal Linux · seccomp + eBPF policies
device model
virtio-net · virtio-blk · vsock
Use it for

What Frontier
is best at.

Cloud browsers (Chromium / Firefox / WebKit)

V8/SpiderMonkey/JSC need a real JIT. Frontier hosts the cloud-browsers plugin with frame-by-frame capture, fingerprint locking, and CDP exposure.
BROWSERS

Cloud desktops with audio + GPU

X11/Wayland with PulseAudio, optional GPU acceleration, persistent VNC. Per-tenant filesystems. The cloud-desktops plugin lives here.
DESKTOPS

Code sandboxes for agents

A fresh Linux per request, tree-sitter-aware shells, reproducible filesystems, deterministic outputs. Cloud-sandboxes runs Frontier when isolation outweighs latency.
SANDBOXES

GPU inference on bare metal

When you need PyTorch + CUDA + the actual driver. Frontier is the kernel boundary that lets you ship vendor drivers without inviting them into the host.
GPU
← HabitatSee compute surface →