
Learn RISC-V with the ‘Earth and Grass Operating System’
This 2000 lines of code OS Egos will bring you to the hearth of the RISC-V architecture
Yunhao Zhang from the Cornell Uni developed a operating system in only 2000 lines of code. In his own words, “This project’s vision is to help every college student read all the code of an operating system. With only 2000 lines of code, egos-2000 implements every component of an operating system for education. It can run on a RISC-V board and also the QEMU software emulator.”
Where RISC-V with its Open Instruction Set Architecture is already introducing many students to world of new silicon and software, this operating system brings them to the heart of it all. The information on GitHub show that Egos can be compiled for the Arty A7 FPGA development board. The name Egos is derived from Earth and Grass Operating System:
• The earth layer implements hardware-specific abstractions for the tty and disk device interfaces and the interrupt and memory management interfaces
• The grass layer implements hardware-independent abstractions for the processes, system calls and inter-process communications
• The application layer implements file system, shell and user commands.
Yunhao has been working with Robbert van Renesse, Lorenzo Alvisi, Shan Lu and Hakim Weatherspoon to pull this project off.
All the code and instructions are available under MIT license at https://github.com/yhzhang0128/egos-2000#readme
