Nachos and Other Operating Systems

Several people have been trying to run Nachos under Windows. This won't work without a lot of work. (If you're interested in what that work consists of, send me mail). If you reached this page from a search engine and are not taking this class from me, you'll want to read more before mailing me.

Some important facts:

1. All Nachos assignments must be turned in and graded on Solaris, in the USC lab environment. If your code doesn't run on the lab machines, your grade will suffer.

   This is to make grading the assignments possible. It is not possible for us to reproduce all operating environments.

2. We cannot offer you support in porting Nachos to your environment. There are just too many students. We will offer answers to reasonable questions about Nachos on the sparcs. In other words, we'll help you with Nachos but we won't do the assignments for you.

3. If you're interested in running Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, or any of the other free Unix variants out there and doing your Nachos assignments on them, that's fine. Please remember rule 1.

   The USC Linux Users Group will help you install such a system on your PC, but will not support or install Nachos. If you want to install Nachos, get the source from Tom Anderson's Nachos page and follow the instructions. The process of getting Nachos running on a free UNIX should be well within a 402x student's abilities, if not before the course, certainly after it.

   The USCLUG members will not do your 402 homework for you, nor should they be asked to. They will not install Nachos or the cross-compiler for you. If you bother them with 402 questions, I will hear aboutit, and will be unhappy with you. If you have questions about what's appropriate to ask them about, feel free to ask me.

4. Because of the byte ordering of Intel x86 processors (including Pentium) differs from that of the sparc (i.e. the USC lab machines), it is possible to write code that would run on a (hypothetical) Nachos port to an x86 architecture that would not run on the sparc architecture on which you will be graded.

Questions or comments to me, of course.