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?

4 Responses to “HOWTO: Pintos on QEMU on Debian”

Siddharth says:

August 2, 2008 at 6:32 am

running that little test app gives an error: Cannot find OS disk.

Please help
Michael J. says:

August 2, 2008 at 10:08 am

@Siddharth – QEMU’s got to be able to find the disk image. you can either throw the disk image in your PATH, or easier – just run that command (qemu linux-0.2.img) in the directory where your linux-0.2.img is hanging out.
Siddharth says:

August 2, 2008 at 6:49 pm

Nopes I am not talking about linux-0.2 I am talking about pintos.
I did all the configuration and when I am trying to run pintos run alarm-multiple I am getting : Cannot find OS disk.

Thanks in advance

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[linuxkernelnewbies] HOWTO: Pintos on QEMU on Debian » Mike / Michael Fogel

HOWTO: Pintos on QEMU on Debian

4 Responses to “HOWTO: Pintos on QEMU on Debian”

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