is toro a unikernel?

[MatiasVara]

Hi, I am Matias Vara and a couple of days ago I found what a unikernel is and I was very surprised. I started the project Toro kernel in 2006 (torokernel.io) which is a library that compiles with freepascal applications and enable to run them alone in a VM. For the moment, Toro kernel cannot run on top of a hypervisor but it is on the future plans. Based on this description, is Toro a unikernel?

Thanks, Matias.

[avsm]

Hi Matias! Thanks for introducing us to Toro -- I had not run across it before and would have cited it in the early papers if I had seen it. A unikernel is essentially a library operating system, and so if you can separate out the various Toro support libraries and reuse them, it counts as a unikernel :-)

One potential blocker is the use of the GPL in Toro, since it makes it difficult to mix with other libraries that are also not full GPL, but this is a decision that is obviously very project specific depending on your preferences.

[MatiasVara]

Thanks for the answer! From your words seem toro is a unikernel. It is funny that I presented of Toro in FOSDEM'15 but I never used the word unikernel, instead, I said application-oriented kernel to strees the thing that we are dedicating the kernel to one application. I plan to port it to Xen to soon.

About the use of GPL, I did not give to much attention on the license, that was my fault :(

[avsm]

There's no requirement to use the word unikernel ;-)

One thing that really helps though, is to make an effort to publish libraries separately so that they can be reused for other purposes in the future. You may be interested in the Solo5 repository, which is a library that gives you a hypervisor layer that works very easily with KVM. https://github.com/solo5

[MatiasVara]

Thanks, I'll check it!