ExectOS Operating System

Building ExectOS

ExectOS must be compiled with the XTChain toolchain. Make sure you have already downloaded and installed it. Once this is done and the source code is ready, open a terminal and launch the XTChain Build Environment.

xtchain

Then, set your target build architecture and the build type and configure the project. Choose i686 or amd64 depending on the architecture you wish to target. The build type can be either DEBUG for debugging purposes or RELEASE for a production build.

charch [i686|amd64]
chbuild [DEBUG|RELEASE]
./configure.sh

After the sources are configured, navigate to the build directory and compile the source code.

cd build
xbuild

Afterwards, you will find the binaries in build/output/binaries directory. Apart from that, depending on build type, you can also find a debug symbols in PDB format in build/output/symbols folder and precompiled libraries that can be used to link other software using XTDK in build/output/library

Creating Qemu Disk Image

If you want to build a disk image that is ready to use with Qemu, you can use the following command:

xbuild diskimg

This will create a disk image that you can boot within a Qemu Virtual Machine, or convert to other format for use within other hypervisor, like VirtualBox.

Testing with Qemu

After successfully compiling ExectOS, you can test it using Qemu with either hardware virtualization (KVM) or software emulation (TCG). To start Qemu with KVM, use the testkvm target, and for TCG emulation, use the testtcg target. These targets are provided for convenience and you can run these commands from your build directory.

xbuild testkvm  # For KVM hardware virtualization

or

xbuild testtcg  # For TCG software emulation

These commands will automatically configure Qemu with the appropriate settings for ExectOS and start the virtual machine. In addition to Qemu, you can also use Bochs for emulation. Bochs is an IA-32 (x86) PC emulator that provides a different emulation environment. To launch Bochs with the ExectOS image, run the following command:

xbuild bochsvm

This will start the Bochs emulator with ExectOS loaded, allowing you to test the system in an environment that may offer different debugging capabilities compared to Qemu.

Remember that the performance and debugging features will vary depending on whether you use KVM, TCG, or Bochs. KVM requires that your host machine supports hardware virtualization, while TCG is a pure software emulator which works on systems without hardware virtualization. Bochs provides a rich set of debugging features, which can be useful when troubleshooting complex issues.