Cross platform (embedded systems) development of MINIX 3 using Windows inside Bochs virtual machine

[salam]

Basically I want to port MINIX 3 (minimum) on other platforms
(embedded systems, I have not yet choosen which one) using Windows as
my developing platform. It's like cross platform development of MINIX
3 using Windows.

Is it possible to rebuild MINIX 3 for other platforms on MINIX 3
itself on a Bochs virtual machine inside windows?

-- Shahid

[Erik van der Kouwe]

Hi,

Currently MINIX can only be built on MINIX and only supports the x86
architecture. There is a branch that allows cross-compilation, which
can be found here: http://wiki.minix3.org/en/DevelopersGuide/NewBuildSystem.
You can try whether maybe this can be used from Cygwin, which would
allow you to cross-compile from Windows.

Building from a virtual machine should never be a problem. Be sure,
however, that you have some way to get the results from the VM to the
host machine. Networking (for example FTP) is the easiest way to
achieve this. Another possibility is sharing a phycial disk between
the host and the guest, but this would be easier on Linux since it can
read the MINIX filesystem.

I would not recommend using Bochs. It is a full emulator, which has
its uses but is very slow. Even on state-of-the-art hardware MINIX
would probably be to sow to really use. QEMU is faster and VMWare
Player is much faster; both are free but the latter is not open-
source. If you have recent hardware and switch to Linux as a host, you
can use KVM which is probably the easiest way to get good performance.

With kind regards,
Erik