Toro boots on Firecracker

Hello folks! this time I want to talk about Firecraker and the possibility to boot Toro on it. I have presented some of this work at FOSDEM'19. You can find the slides here. Roughly speaking, Firecracker is a simple Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) for KVM which is develop by Amazon and the goal is to boot light Linux VMs on x86-64 processors. It proposes a simple device model based on virtIO. The interest to allow Toro to boot on Firecraker is twofold:
1. To speed up the booting time. For example, after I worked on the bootloader, it was posible to boot up the kernel in about 20ms.
2. To reduce the footprint of the VMM thus allowing to run more toro's instances.
There is however a lot of remained work. For example, Firecraker is based on the new version of virtIO which is not supported by Toro. It is thus mandatory to work on the current virtIO drivers to support such a version.

Matias

New website and more!

Hello folks! I want to summarize the features/improvements in Toro in the last four months.

New Website 

I worked to change the website as you can see at http://www.torokernel.io. I added a button where you can try the same website on a Toro server. This feature is still beta but I plan to host the whole site on such a webserver. This is the very first time that Toro is in production!

Support to AWS and Google Cloud Engine

I successfully tried Toro examples in AWS and Google Cloud Engine. If you want to try, you can find a tutorial at the website.   

Unit Testing

I added tests that run when a change is integrated into master branch. The tests run as a VM launched by travis.  Tests allow to prevent regressions.

Tachyon

I launched a new project named Tachyon which is a webserver based on the Static WebServer example. You can learn about this project at https://github.com/torokernel/tachyon.


Matias