A dedicated unikernel for microservices

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

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

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