Building K42

There are two options. If you have an x86 Debian machine and you would like to cross-compile K42 to run on your ppc64 machine, then simply installing the k42-devkit packages might be best for you. See this email post:

Otherwise, you should take a look at Cort Dougan's work on a script that can take an x86 Fedora, Gentoo, Debian etc. machine and turn it into a K42 development environment. See his two email posts:

(Re)Building the Linux tree

  1. Edit Makefile.k42 so MKANCHOR points to the root of the K42 tree
  2. make -f Makefile.k42

Another Option for Building K42

I (NathanSweet) have attempted to simplify the process of building (and running) K42 by putting together a script that makes the process relatively hands-free. The target audience for the script is students taking the Advanced OS class here at UNM. The hope is that students will be able to explore modern OS concepts using K42 as a platform. This script minimizes the task of getting K42 compiled and running on Mambo. Also, it assumes that there's a central repository for particular files: a tarball containing the gpul release of Mambo, a clean snapshot of kitchsrc, a victim configuration file, and a copy of MakePaths.proto that contains a configuration for the site. Perusing the script should give you more details. The script also assumes that the k42-devkit packages are installed (or their tarball equivalents), since the script is, of course, dependent on that toolchain to be available.

It should be noted that there were a number of issues that we had to work around. One of them being that, in our department, users' home directories are mounted via NFS. To work around that, after compilation, kitchroot is copied to a filesystem location that is local to the computer that the user is working on. Regardless of these issues, the script is easily modifiable to adapt to different needs. If nothing else, it, along with the attached how-to, is a useful reference, as it ties together a bunch of issues that were discussed on the mailing list.

I have attached the script (k42.sh) and instructions for its usage (k42-howto.pdf).

BuildingK42 (last edited 2005-12-22 21:46:43 by NathanSweet)