Running and Compiling Halide

Running and Compiling HalideOS on your System #

Running HalideOS in Oracle Virtual Box #

  1. Head over to the Releases section of the GitHub repository and download the halide.iso file.

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  1. Open up Oracle VM VirtualBox. Click on New.

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  1. Put HalideOS as the name. Set Type to Other and Version to Other/Unknown.

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  1. Set the memory size. 64 MB will be enough.

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  1. Click on Next and select Do not add a virtual disk and click on Create.

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  1. You will see an instance created. Now we need to load the halide.iso file we just downloaded. For that, navigate to Settings.

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  1. Under Settings, go to Storage and click on the Empty option in the left pane.

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  1. Click the CD like icon next to IDE Secondary Master.

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  1. Choose the halide.iso file.

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  1. Then click OK.

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  1. You are all set, just click on Start to fire up HalideOS.

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  1. Put your name as the username. Password is dsc-kiit

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  1. Press Enter

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  1. You will be logged in and a console will be setup for you

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Congratulations, you just booted into HalideOS!

Commands #

These are the commands that are available in the HalideOS console:

  • about - Know more about HalideOS
  • help - Get a list of all available commands
  • calculator - A basic calculator that can evaluate expressions like 10-3*2 (don’t put spaces or brackets)
  • greet - Get a greeting
  • clear - Clears the console
  • switch window - Switches to the next window

Try them out for yourself.

If you’re curious then the source code for halide is available at https://github.com/DSC-KIIT/project-halide

Compiling HalideOS from Source #

This section will help you with setting up your development environment so that you can compile the code for HalideOS yourself and run it in an emulator. This is a good place to start if you are intersted in contributing code to the project.

Dependencies #

It is recommended that you used a Linux based operating system for building HalideOS. The C/C++ development tools and the entire ecosystem is much easier to use on a Linux based system.

  • g++ - A C++ compiler
  • nasm or as - An x86 assembler
  • ld - The GNU Linker
  • make - GNU Make, a build tool for Linux
  • qemu - An x86 Emulator
  • git - For version control
  • A text editor of your choice. We use Visual Studio Code

You can Google up how to install these tools for your host operating system. On Linux based systems you will mostly install them using your package manager.

Once you have all these set up on your machine, run the following commands

git clone https://github.com/DSC-KIIT/project-halide
cd project-halide/src
make run

This will compile and build kernel.iso in the src/ directory and start it in qemu.

You can run make help to get a list of all the commands available for various stages of compilation.

Please refer to the Documentation section of the website for more details on the design and the code.