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RMoX: Raw Metal occam

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About RMoX

You can find RMoX's new home here: http://rmox.net/

RMoX is the Raw Metal occam operating environment. This is basically the Flux OSKit, KRoC (which has been tweaked a bit for for RMoX), and enough occam to play the OS game (with a small amount of C). Here's a piccy of the process network (generated from rmox.fig). Some of the network is implemented, some is just ideas.

• Students curious about potential projects for RMoX should look at the projects page. Suggesting your own, or a hybrid, is also fine (and encouraged too, we can't think of everything..!).

Download

Okay, I've churned enough of these out to make a list:

• 14/12/2003 rmox-zImage-20031214 (273k).
• 07/12/2003 rmox-zImage-20031207 (268k).

The above image (14/12/2003) is a substantially newer version of RMoX than those below. In particular, all the various C components in this version have been built with gcc 3.3(.2/.3). There is one slight problem with this image, in that the idle-task does not appear to run (well, it appears to be running, but not entirely correctly). Previous problems with the device file-system have now been fixed. A strange `pause' has also been observed. This and the idle-task are under investigation.

• 20/11/2002 rmox-zImage-20112002 (386k).
• 02/10/2002 rmox-zImage-02102002 (379k).
• 01/10/2002 rmox-zImage-01102002 (386k).
• 13/09/2002 rmox-zImage-13092002 (386k).

To experiment with this, transfer the (latest) image onto a floppy and boot it! In Linux, dd is the normal tool:

    shell$ dd if=./rmox-zImage-20031214 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512

If you're a windows user, there is a program called rawwrite which can transfer images onto floppies. You can also use this image without rebooting, it functions (more or less) under plex86. It might work under vmware -- there have been reports of it crashing vmware (and taking windows with it). This version is pretty CPU intensive, since the idle loop is halt-free (busy). Once booted, there are 6 functional `virtual consoles', which can be accessed using [ALT+]F1..F6. (ALT is currently optional for this). The first is the kernel log, 2, 3 and 4 are running example programs (which can be interacted with), 5 is inactive and 6 is running the system console (sort of a very simple shell).

Here is the slightly older `proof of concept' version, which had a largely static and simple process network:

• rmox-zImage-29082002 (300k). zImage from 29/08/2002.

The source code for the new version (network above) will appear once it's in a more functional state.

Other things

• The version of usermode RMoX released requires a patch to the file-lib. This will be included in KRoC/Linux 1.3.3-pre13, until then, the patch (from Christian) can be downloaded: bsc-filelib.patch (9k). To apply this, go into the kroc/src/bsclib-1.0/ directory and run ``patch -p0 < /path/to/bsc-filelib.patch''. You might want to run it with the `--dry-run' option first too, just to check.