Running Pintos

The "pintos" Utility

We've supplied a program for conveniently running Pintos in a simulator (Qemu or Bochs), called pintos. In the simplest case, you can invoke pintos as pintos [argument...]. Each argument is passed to the Pintos kernel for it to act on.

Try it out!

• First cd into the newly created build directory.

• Then issue the command pintos -- run alarm-multiple, which passes the arguments run alarm-multiple to the Pintos kernel.

  • In these arguments, run instructs the kernel to run a test and alarm-multiple is the test to run.

  • This command invokes Qemu. Then Pintos boots and runs the alarm-multiple test program, outputing a few lines of text. When it's done, you can close Qemu by Ctrl+a+c .

  • You can log the output to a file by redirecting at the command line, e.g. pintos -- run alarm-multiple > logfile.

options

The pintos program offers several options for configuring the simulator or the virtual hardware. If you specify any options, they must precede the arguments passed to the Pintos kernel and be separated from them by --, so that the whole command looks like:

pintos option1 option2 ... -- arg1 arg2 ....

You may be confused by the strange "--" at first, thus we will shed more light on it here.

• The options specified before "--" are used to config the pintos program.

• While the arguments that specified after "--" are the real actions you expect pintos to execute.

You can invoke pintos -h to see a list of available options.

• Options can select a simulator to use: the default is Qemu, but --bochs selects Bochs.

• You can run the simulator with a debugger. Just select --gdb option.

• You can set the amount of memory to give the VM with option -m.

• Finally, you can select how you want VM output to be displayed: use -v to turn off the VGA display, -t to use your terminal window as the VGA display instead of opening a new window (Bochs only), or -s to suppress serial input from stdin and output to stdout.

The pintos utility program is heavily used by our testing suites, so it is fully configurable and very flexible. You certainly do not need to remember all these options and you can always refer to it by running the command "pintos -h".