MinixPPC A port of the MINIX OS to the PowerPC platform Creating a programming model for architecture independency Master Thesis Computer Science Ingmar A. Alting September 15, 2006 First reader and supervisor: Andrew S. Tanenbaum Dept. of Computer Science Faculty of Sciences Vrije Universiteit De Boelelaan 1081A 1081 HV Amsterdam, the Netherlands e-mail:
[email protected] Second reader: Herbert Bos Dept. of Computer Science Faculty of Sciences Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam De Boelelaan 1081A 1081 HV Amsterdam, the Netherlands e-mail:
[email protected] Thesis by: Ingmar A. Alting Weth. W. de Boerstraat 18 1788AT Den Helder, the Netherlands email:
[email protected] Abstract The main goal of this project is to indicate what it means to port an operating system from one architecture to another, and provide a programming paradigm that would make future ports easy and fast. The “natively” supported architecture of MINIX is the IBM PC compatible, that's built around the Intel architecture. This is a CISC architecture with hardware support for easy stack usage. The choice for the POWER architecture could not have been further away as this is a RISC architecture, and completely” different in many ways. This thesis will focuses on the model created for creating portable system code. Not to be confused with portable programs using a “standard” API. It will describe the changes made and problems faced porting the MINIX code base. The places where changes are made can be viewed as hotspots. For every new architecture compatibility problems are to be expected there. Some hotspots are used as example and the solution taken for MinixPPC is presented to the reader.