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. 

Toro will be at FOSDEM'19!

Hello Folks! I have the pleasure to present Toro at FOSDEM'19. This will be my third presentation. This time I am going to talk about how Toro is optimized to speed up the booting time. This is particularly interesting in the context of microservices. When a VM is used to host a microservice, it is powered on/off on demand. This allows cloud providers to save resources like CPU and memory. However, this requires that the VM is up and running very quickly. In this talk, I discuss three approaches that aim to speed up the initialization of VMs. These approaches are NEMU, Qboot, and Firecracker (see abstract here). During the talk, I use these solutions in Toro and I discuss benefits and drawbacks.