Genode on the L4ka::Pistachio microkernel

Pistachio is the reference implementation of the L4 API version x.2 (also referred to a v4). It is developed by the System Architecture Group at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany and the DiSy group at the University of New South Wales, Australia.

Because this kernel has been the experimentation platform for a lot of exciting research experiments at the L4ka group and it is the basis for the commercial version of L4 developed by OK-Labs, Pistachio is a very interesting base platform for the Genode OS Framework.

The original port of the Genode OS Framework to Pistachio is the work of Julian Stecklina who wanted to elaborate on the portability of the framework and explore the use of Pistachio's multi-processor capabilities with Genode.

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

Downloading, building, and using L4ka::Pistachio

Please make sure that you haved downloaded and installed the tool chain, which will be used for both, the L4ka::Pistachio kernel and Genode.

To download the kernel source codes, issue ./tool/ports/prepare_port pistachio. This command will checkout the upstream Git repository of the kernel. Please make sure to have Git installed.

For the vesa driver on x86 the x86emu library is required and can be downloaded and prepared by invoking the following command:

 ./tool/ports/prepare_port x86emu

After having successfully prepared the base-pistachio repository and libports you are ready to create a Genode build directory using the 'tool/create_builddir':

 <genode-dir>/tool/create_builddir pistachio_x86 \
     BUILD_DIR=<build-dir>

From within this directory, you can build the kernel by using make kernel. The kernel will be built within <build-dir>/kernel/pistachio using the Genode tool chain.

To build and start Genode directly from within the Genode build directory, issue

 make run/demo

This command will execute the steps described in the run script located at os/run/demo.run. It will build all Genode components needed for the demo scenario, create a configuration, and start the scenario using Qemu. To inspect the individual steps more closely or learn the steps needed to manually integrate Genode with L4ka::Pistachio, please revisit the Pistachio-specific run environment at tool/run/boot_dir/pistachio.