Build XINU on Windows

Preparation

First, make sure that you have all packages in the "Devel" category of Cygwin installed on your Windows machine. This will provide a UNIX-like background for performing gcc compilation and allows the use of other UNIX commands (ie. cat, hostname, etc).

Next, you will need to create two directories: /usr/src/build-binutils and /usr/src/build-gcc .

Then, you will want to download the appropriate binary utilities. We downloaded binutils version 2.17 and saved it in the directory /usr/src/build-binutils.

Then, download the GNU C Compiler. We downloaded GCC version 4.1.1 and saved it in the directory /usr/src/build-gcc.

Once these are both downloaded, navigate to their respective directories and untar the tar files.

Build Process

BINUTILS

First, navigate to the directory of the newly untarred files. For us the directory was /usr/src/build-binutils/binutils-2.17. Once there, run the following commands:

./configure --target=mipsel --prefix=/usr/cross --disable-nls
make all install

You will want to add these files to the path with the command:

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/cross/bin

NOTE: you can also add the command to your ~/.bashrc file to automatically add that directory to PATH everytime Cygwin is started.

GCC

Again, navigate to the directory of the newly untarred files. For us the directory was /usr/src/build-gcc/gcc-4.1.1. Once there, run the following commands:

./configure --target=mipsel --prefix=/usr/cross --disable-nls -enable-languages=c --without-headers
make all-gcc install-gcc

Running on Windows
The previous setup should be sufficient for compiling and running XINU inside of a Cygwin bash shell. However, if you want to run it on regular Windows you will need to prepend the Cygwin paths to the Windows environment because in Windows XP hostname acts differently than hostname under UNIX. We solved this problem by adding  C:\cygwin\bin  and  C:\cygwin\usr\cross\bin  to the Windows XP environment PATH first, before any other directories. This way, hostname from the Cygwin installation will be the first occurrence of "hostname" when the XINU code tries to execute the command.



This work is supported in part by NSF grant DUE-CCLI-0737476.