Project Description

Project GIMMIX has the goal to construct an operating system including toolchain for Donald E. Knuth's MMIX processor. To achieve that, an own simulator for MMIX has been developed from scratch, which does not only simulate user mode but also kernel mode instructions (unlike MMIX-SIM) and is doing this faster and considerably more user-friendly than Knuth's pipelined simulator MMIX-PIPE (albeit not nearly as flexible).

By now, the simulator is finished and provides basic devices necessary for an operating system. These have been ported from the ECO32 project and include a disk, terminals, a timer, a ROM, a display and keyboard and an output device for debugging. The still missing steps are:

construct a back-end for a C compiler to generate MMIX assembler from C source (LCC ist the most promising candidate here)
implement a standard C library for use with the C compiler
get an operating system running on this computer (candidates are UNIX V7 and Tanenbaum's MINIX)