HOWTO: Pintos on QEMU on Debian

Pintos is a minimal operating system for x86 hardware used primarily for instructional purposes (eg.). QEMU is an open-source hardware emulator typically used for operating system development. Debian is a linux operating system, regular style.

Step #1 – Debian: Drop windows and install debian (or go dual-boot).

Step #2 – QEMU:

sudo apt-get install qemu

To test everything is working as it should at this point, you can download a small linux kernel image here (Sec: disk images). Then:

bzip2 -d linux-0.2.img.bz2
qemu linux-0.2.img

You are now running a minimal linux system on emulated x86 hardware, which is in turn running on a full-featured linux system (debian) on real (probably also x86) hardware. Press ctrl-alt to get out of the minimal linux system if you get stuck with it stealing all your keystrokes.

Step #3 – Pintos:

• 3.A – Download pintos.
• 3.B – Fix pintos to default to QEMU (rather than bochs) by applying the following diff:

  Index: threads/Make.vars
  =======================================
  @@ -4,4 +4,5 @@
  -SIMULATOR = --bochs
  +#SIMULATOR = --bochs
  +SIMULATOR = --qemu
  
  Index: utils/pintos
  =======================================
  @@ -85,7 +85,7 @@
  -    $sim = "bochs" if !defined $sim;
  +    $sim = "qemu" if !defined $sim;
  @@ -107,8 +107,8 @@
  -  --bochs                  (default) Use Bochs as simulator
  -  --qemu                   Use QEMU as simulator
  +  --qemu                   (default) Use QEMU as simulator
  +  --bochs                  Use Bochs as simulator
  

• 3.C – Compile pintos:

  cd threads/
  make
  

• 3.D – Run a test app with pintos:

  cd threads/build/
  ../../utils/pintos run alarm-multiple
  

• 3.E – You may wish to throw pintos in your default path (some of the scripts provided require it’s there). There are many ways to do this, this is my favorite:

  sudo ln -s `pwd`/utils/pintos /usr/local/bin/

And that’s it! In step 3.D you finished up by running a little test app that created 5 threads that slept for varying predefined periods of time with some messaging to the console, thus testing pintos’ scheduling/threading abilities. You’re now ready to augment and enhance pintos… coffee anyone?