Precompiled Xinu?

[damian birchler]

Hi there!

I just bought the 'operating system design volume 1 - the xinu
approach' and I was really suprised that there wasn't a cd included in
the book. Is there any possibility to obtain a precompiled version of
Xinu in the manner of FreeBSD and co. which can be booted from
CD/flopy disk and leads you step per step trough the installation?

Thanks a lot

[Stanley Wileman]

Hello.

XINU is frequently used in pedagogic and research settings, but also is
sometimes used as an embedded system in some commercial products. It also
exists in a variety of versions, with many variations depending on the
target machine (e.g. X86, Sun, PDP-11, etc.). At least one version (see
Comer & Fossum, Operating System Design The XINU Approach: Volume I: The PC
Edition) is built using existing PC device support, and doesn't include its
own "from scratch" device drivers.

If you're interested, a version with which I and a number of my graduate
students have been heavily involved is available at
http://cs002pc.unomaha.edu/xinu.html. This isn't the latest version, but
should get you started. One of the major limitations of any non-mainstream
operating system is support for devices, and this is certainly the case with
XINU. The version just mentioned includes a device driver I wrote for the
NetGear FA-311 network card, as most of the other network card drivers are
horribly out of date. The FA-311 uses the National Semiconductor DP83815
chipset, and is thus likely capable of being used with other network cards
with the same chipset (with minor modification to the PCI address space
search for the card).

Building XINU from sources should be relatively easy with the distribution
mentioned above. Linux or FreeBSD are required as the development
enviroment. That is, all the compiling and linking is done on a Linux or
FreeBSD platform using GNU tools (gcc, gas, etc.).
Then a boot floppy is created from which the system can be booted.

Good luck!

--Stan Wileman

"damian birchler" <damian_...@bluewin.ch> wrote in message
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