Genode on the Fiasco.OC microkernel

Fiasco.OC is a microkernel originally developed by the OS group of the TU-Dresden. Nowadays, it is primarily maintained and developed by the company Kernkonzept. It's an object-oriented capability-based system for x86, ARM, PowerPC and MIPS platforms.

This document provides brief instructions about downloading, building and booting the Fiasco.OC version of Genode.

Prerequisites

You need certain tools to use the Fiasco.OC build system. On Debian/Ubuntu systems you have to install the following packages:

 apt-get install make gawk g++ binutils pkg-config g++-multilib subversion

Moreover, you need to download and install the tool-chain used by Genode. Have a look at this page:

Building the Fiasco.OC version of Genode

The current version of Genode is available at the public Github repository:

After you've fetched the Genode source tree from the git repository, or downloaded the latest release tar archive, you need the Fiasco.OC source code, its kernel-bindings, additional bootstrap tools etc. To simplify that step, you can use the prepare_port tool:

 ./tool/ports/prepare_port foc

This will install all necessary third-party source code in the contrib folder.

Now, go to a directory where you want the Genode/Fiasco.OC build directory to remain. Use the helper script in the tool directory of the Genode source tree to create the initial build environment. You need to state the build directory you want to create, and the hardware architecture to run Fiasco.OC/Genode on. Choose x86_32, x86_64, or one of the available ARM boards.

 <genode-dir>/tool/create_builddir x86_64

Now, go to the newly created build directory and type make:

 cd build/x86_64
 make KERNEL=foc

This will build the Fiasco.OC kernel, its bootstrap code, and every Genode component, that runs on top of Fiasco.OC.

If you just want to give Genode/Fiasco.OC a try, you can call e.g.: the demo run-script instead of building everything:

 make run/demo KERNEL=foc

Further Information