A dedicated unikernel for microservices

Sunday, October 30, 2016

CloudIt!

Hi folks, I committed the new script CloudIt.sh which is meant to unify the way than an application is compile within Toro and then run in a VM. The script accepts one parameter which is the name of a fpc application. For example, the following figure shows the use of the script to compile and run the ToroHello.pas

Figure 1
The script compiles the application within the Toro kernel (see Figure 2), and then, it generates a .img that can be run in a Qemu VM (see Figure 3).

Figure 2

Figure 3
To get the needed parameters to create the Qemu instance, the script looks for a .qemu which is named with the same name than the application, e.g., ToroHello.qemu. Such a file only contains the needed parameters to pass to qemu.  

The idea in ClouidIt.sh is to show Toro as a unikernel, in this case, for the fpc compiler. It enables a fpc programmer to compile an application within the kernel and then run it in a VM instance. To go further with this approach, Toro should be able to run in an hypervirsor like Xen. This remains a very interesting future work! :)