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Embedded Xinu is an ongoing research and implementation project in the area of Operating Systems and Embedded Systems. Its goal is to port the Xinu Operating System to the embedded MIPS platform. The current release supports Linksys WRT54GL and WRT160NL routers, as well as the Qemu virtual machine. While this project is still in progress, our laboratory environment and curriculum materials are already in use for courses in Operating Systems, Hardware Systems, Embedded Systems, Networking and Compilers.

The Embedded Xinu project was conceived and is supervised by Dr. Dennis Brylow and is being conducted by both graduate and undergraduate students in the Math, Statistics, & Computer Science department of Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The first major phase of work on Embedded Xinu began in the Summer of 2006.

Our project partners include Dr. Bina Ramamurthy at University of Buffalo (with whom we shared an NSF CCLI grant), Dr. Paul Ruth at University of Mississippi, and Dr. Doug Comer (father of Xinu) at Purdue University.

Teaching With Embedded Xinu

• Join us for the Teaching With Embedded Xinu Workshop at SIGCSE 2010 in Milwaukee, WI, March 10. (Early registration ends Jan 31!) This workshop will share ready-made curriculum resources that have been used successfully to teach hardware systems, operating systems, realtime/embedded systems, networking, and compilers with the Embedded Xinu platform at several colleges/universities. Commodity wireless router hardware or equivalent virtual machines, combined with freely-available software and tools, make for a powerful and flexible learning platform without having to fake any components. Come see what Nexos has to offer for your program.

• For curriculum guidance on adopting or adapting Embedded Xinu for undergraduate coursework, see Teaching With Xinu.

Building an Embedded Xinu Laboratory

In this section we are developing instructions so that other groups can benefit from the work we are doing. These guides can be followed more or less in order to create a relatively inexpensive platform for a custom operating system. As our work develops further, there will be more Xinu-specific information.

1. Obtain a supported platform.
2. Modify the Linksys hardware
3. Connect to a modified router
4. Build Xinu
5. Deploy Xinu
6. (Optional) Build a pool of backends

Other Embedded Xinu Information

• MIPS processor
• Main memory
• Exception and Interrupt Handling
• UART driver
• TTY driver
• Switch driver
• Flash memory
• Enhanced Joint Test Action Group debugger
• Standard library

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The Xinu Lab is brought to you in part by M&M's.