Running Toro on top of VirtualBox

I am glad to announce that Toro is supported by VirtualBox. After bug fixing in the bootloader, Toro perfectly boots on VirtualBox:

This way Toro can run on Hyper-V, VMWare, QEMU, KVM and now VirtualBox. 

Running Toro on top of Hyper-V

Hello folks! I am working on the bootloader of Toro to be able to boot on HyperV. First experiments seem very interesting! I could run the example ToroHello on top of HyperV.

I found that the problem was the use of mm0 register in the bootloader. While this works well in KVM or QEMU, in Hyper-V the system hangs/crashes. By using a general purpose register like EBX, the problem is fixed and the kernel is loaded. I could not figure out why this is happening. Also, it was a bit tricky to wake up the other cores but, finally, I got them up. In the the near future, Hyper-V will be installed on every Windows in this context Toro can be an option of containers in a Windows environment. 

The four steps to deploy a Toro application in the Cloud

Hi folks! Toro makes very simple the deployment of standalone-applications on Clouds. I just committed the script SetupCloudGuest.sh which is meant to install the needed tools to run a Toro application in a VM and then makes it public on internet by relying on port forwarding. These are the four steps:

1) Get a machine in Scaleway that will be used to run KVM and the Toro's guests.

2) Clone Toro repo. This contains the needed scripts to setup the host.

3) Run torokernel/tests/SetupCloudGuest.sh. This installs KVM and other needed tools.

3) Download the image that run the guest. For example, you can download TorowithFileSystem.img from here. The image must be copied to torokernel/tests. This workflow supposes that the development is done in other machine and the Toro image is just copied from your local machine to the host.

4) Finally, run Cloudit.sh TorowithFileSystem onlykvm

 

That's all folks! You can get the guest's console by using a VNC Viewer to port 5900, or connect to port 80 of guest by connecting to port 80 of host.

Deploying a TORO guest in the Cloud

Hi folks! this weekend I deployed a TORO guest in the Scaleway's Cloud. This can be checked by connecting a VNC client to  51.15.142.20:5900

Figure1. VNC Viewer on Windows connected to the Toro guest.

What you see is a TORO guest running on top of KVM. This example runs the ToroHello.pas which just prints a message to the screen. I am working to add more examples that use the filesystem and the network stack. Here I am writing down all the procedure to compile Toro in Ubuntu and run the example on KVM. This example, yet very simple, shows how easy is to deploy an application which is compiled within Toro kernel and run it in a VM without interference of an OS.