View Proposal

---

Proposer

Adam Sampson

Title

Port a classic operating system to a modern platform

Goal

Make one of several older open-source operating systems work on modern ARM or RISC-V

Description

There are a range of older operating systems that have been released under FOSS licenses, including: - EmuTOS and MiNT (originally 68000) - https://emutos.sourceforge.io/ and https://freemint.github.io/ - RISC OS (originally ARM) - https://www.riscosopen.org/ - Coherent (originally x86 and others) - https://gunkies.org/wiki/Coherent As these were intended for use on computers of the 1980s, with processors running at a few MHz and at most a few MiB of memory, they would be a good fit in terms of resources for modern middle-spec microcontrollers. Take one of these systems and make it run on, say, an embedded RISC-V chip. (EmuTOS would be the simplest; MiNT the most capable; both written in C and compilable with modern toolchains. RISC OS is mostly in ARM assembler so porting some of it to ARMv8 would make for an interesting project. Coherent is 1980s-style C but was intended to be portable originally.)

Resources

Background

Url

Difficulty Level

High

Ethical Approval

None

Number Of Students

2

Supervisor

Adam Sampson

Keywords

operating system, portability, history, arm, risc-v

Degrees

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Bachelor of Science in Computer Systems
Master of Engineering in Software Engineering
Master of Science in Computing (2 Years)
Master of Science in Information Technology (Software Systems)
Master of Science in Software Engineering
Bachelor of Science in Computing Science
Bachelor of Engineering in Robotics