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

Toro supports VirtIO block disks and Berkeley sockets

Hello folks! I am glad to announce that Toro supports virtio block devices (issue #158) and berkeley sockets (issue #268). I worked on these issues the last two months and they are already in master. To tests these new features, I modified the StaticWebServer example. You can see that the ata driver has been replaced by the virtio disk driver. Also, you can see that the non-blocking webservice has been replaced for the classical berkeley sockets.

Matias 

Roadmap for 2019

Hello folks! I would like to share the roadmap for this year. I am going to focus on improving Toro to run light microservices on VMs. To achieve this, I am going to work on:
1. Reduce the generated image
2. Speed up the booting time
3. Support to microVM, e.g., Firecracker, NEMU.
Most microVM solutions avoid the using of emulated devices so it is very important to add support for more VirtIO devices. Therefore the next feature is 4) to develop the VirtIO block driver (see issue #158). In addition, Toro is going to support classic berkeley sockets for microservices that performs intense IO. Such a feature is currently developed in issue #268.

Toro in 2018 was great!

Hello folks! the year is ending and I want to summarise what happen in Toro during 2018. Let me begin with the events. We had the opportunity to present Toro in FOSDEM'18 and Open Source Summit Europe 2018. Both conferences were very interesting and we got tone of feedback. Regarding with publications, I had the pleasure to write an article for the Blaise Pascal Magazine. I hope to continue by doing this in 2019. This year was particularly interesting in new features. Here I list a few of them: 
- Virtio network driver
- Fat driver to enable support of the qemu's vfat interface
- Support for try..except statement 
- Support for the -O2 flag when kernel is compiled
- Optimisation of the cpu usage during idle loop
- Optimisation of the booting time and the size of the generated image. This is going to be presented in FOSDEM'19.
But how 2019 will be for Toro? Toro is perfect for microservices and during 2019 we will show that. Toro is going to support both blocking and non-blocking sockets. The former for microservices that do IO and the latter for microservices that do not need to block to answer requests. Toro is going to support more Virtio drivers, e.g, block devices, serial devices. Following that work, I am investigating the porting of Toro to solutions that propose the use of microVMs like firecracker or NEMU. Roughly speaking, these solutions propose a reduced device model in which most of the devices are not emulated and only VirtIO devices are supported. These solutions have several benefits like small footprint and fast booting thus making these solutions perfect to host microservices.

Have a nice 2019!

Matias.