A dedicated unikernel for microservices

Friday, May 17, 2019

Supports to virtiofs: almost done!

Hello folks! last two weeks I have been working on a virtio-fs driver for Toro. If you want to know more about this virtio device please see https://virtio-fs.gitlab.io. Roughly speaking, virtiofs is a virtio device that allows guest to access files in the host. This virtio device is based on FUSE. The host is the server whereas the guest is the client. The main motivation to add support to this device is to reduce the number of layer between the user and the access to disk. In a typical path, you have at least three layers: the vfs, the block buffer and disk driver. With this new driver we reduce the number of copies for every disk block to one, which is in the user space. Some tests shows me an speed up of 50% in comparison with virtio-blk/fat. If you want to see the code please check https://github.com/torokernel/torokernel/tree/feature/issue%23318. This is going to hit master in some weeks so stay tuned!

Matias