[J-core] Anybody want to port MIT's xv6 project to j-core?

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Sat Apr 30 19:57:56 EDT 2016


Back in the 80's, AT&T started asserting copyrights on Unix v7, which
meant that professors stayed on Unix v6 for educational use (teaching
college courses in operating system design). The famous "Lions' Book"
started as a Samizdat* version of one professor's lecture notes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions%27_Commentary_on_UNIX_6th_Edition,_with_Source_Code

Fast forward 30 years and Unix v6 is no longer a good teaching tool: it
targets a 16-bit PDP 11 and is written in pre-ANSI C (pre-K&R even). So
the MIT open courseware people decided to write a new one in C99
targeting x86:

  https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2014/xv6.html

When you clone the git repo on that page and type "make", it builds a
filesystem image that boots to a shell prompt under qemu.

Now _my_ question is, what would it take to port this to j-core and boot
it on a MimasV2? (At which point you can have a _pair_ of courses: the
hardware side in VHDL and the software side in C. :)

Rob

* Useful word. The soviets had an oppressive totalitarian regime, we
have copyright law. Six of one...


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