[Lazarus] toro kernel

Matias Vara matiasevara at gmail.com
Sun Dec 31 15:41:44 CET 2017


Hello everyone,

I wanted to share some news about the Toro kernel project (
http://www.torokernel.io and http://github.com/MatiasVara/torokernel) which
is a kernel written in Freepascal that compiles together with the user
application thus allowing to run the application in standalone way. Toro
can run either in baremetal or on top of an hypervisor like HyperV,
VirtualBox, KVM. It seems very similar to a container, however, in Toro the
application is compiled within the kernel. In addition, the image generated
by toro is "immutable" so the same image can be used in different
hypervisors without any change. Toro has a very optimized architecture for
multicore systems. For example, every core has its own scheduler but
migration between different schedulers is allowed. All this is implemented
without the using of atomic operations. A lot of work has been done since I
started in 2004. Most of the interesting features are:
- Networking, i.e., e1000, ne2000.
- Filesystem,, i.e., ext2
- Block drivers, i.e., ATA disk.
- Stack TCP-IP.
- Memory manager, up to 512 gb.
Many other features are coming like virtio devices which will allow faster
drivers when toro runs on KVM. I am also working on running instance of
Toro in AWS and Google Cloud. Other interesting field is the microservices.
I am currently comparing Toro with other solutions like Apache. The point
here is that Toro instance would be able to run many microservices and
support "many" concurrently connections. What I am doing now is trying to
figure out how much is "many" and what is the bottleneck. For example,
emulated network drivers seems one of them. If you want to see an instance
of Toro running a simple microservice, browse to http://212.47.247.255/.
This is a Toro guest on top of KVM. You can connect by using VNCViewer at
port 5900 if you want to see the console.
I am very open to try Toro in different situations/use cases. BTW, I will
be in the next FOSDEM is someone wants to talk personally. I am going to
show some work about how Toro reduces the CPU usage of VM instance when
runs an user application. So feel free to contact me anytime, all feedback
is welcome!

Happy new year, Matias.
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