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.

Testing Toro on KVM and Xen

Hi folks! These days I have been experimenting with Toro on KVM and Xen. This is still experimental work but it demonstrates how flexible Toro is. In KVM, I had very good results and ,with minor changes, Toro was running without any problem.

In Xen, I tried with an HVM guest. However, I can't go further than booting the kernel. It seems that I am getting a lot of exceptions when Toro tries to wake up the cores in the system.

I will focus on Xen in the next days. In addition, I am very interested in test Toro in Hyper-V so stay tuned!

Matias

E1000 driver is alive!

Hi folks! I spent this weekend trying to make the driver e1000 works. I started with this piece of code in 2011. I based on the code of Minix3. However, I could not go further than getting the MAC address, and then, I just gave up. I restarted last weekend and I did a great progress. I have almost the ToroPing.pas example working (see Figure 1). The key was to enable E1000_DEBUG in QEMU and put the hands in the code to understand as much as possible what the network card was doing. I will give more details about how enable debugging in QEMU in future posts.

Figure 1. ToroPing.pas running with E1000 driver.

 I will continue progressing on E1000 in the following weeks so stay tuned!

Matias