Hello folks! I have spent some time to port Toro to QEMU-Lite. This work is still very experimental and can be found in the branch feature-bootforqemu-lite. If you want to know more about QEMU-Lite check this great presentation. Roughly speaking, QEMU-Lite is an improved version of QEMU, which is dedicated to boot a Linux kernel guest. QEMU-Lite improves the booting time by removing unnecessary steps in the booting process. For example, it removes the BIOS and the need of a bootloader. When QEMU jumps to the kernel code, the microprocessor is already in 64 bit long mode with paging enabled. To make Toro works on QEMU-Lite, I have to remove the whole bootloader and replace it by a simpler one that supports the Multiboot standar. So far I am only able to boot the application ToroHello.pas that takes only 123ms to boot. Future work will be to support multiprocessing so stay tuned!
Cheers, Matias.
