MINTIA is a custom operating system written in a custom programming language, as part of a half-decade personal project to create a fully from-scratch RISC workstation computer called XR/station.

MINTIA aims to be something that might have come off of a weird workstation computer made by a doomed company in 1989, and that might have been considered a pretty strong system at the time. It is also intended to be very portable.

The scheduler design is inspired by FreeBSD's ULE. The overall system structure, particularly the usage of a hierarchical interrupt structure and the usage of software interrupts for deferred events, is inspired by the Windows NT kernel. The memory manager is inspired by VMS, NT, and UVM. The overall structure of the IO system, particularly its fundamentally asynchronous nature, is inspired by VMS and NT. The locking design (usage of turnstiles and priority inheritance) is inspired by Solaris. The plug-n-play and power management aspects of the IO system are inspired by XNU's IOKit.

The newsdk should be in a directory ../newsdk relative to this repository. It should be set up as per the instructions in that repo.

The a4x repository should also be cloned at ../a4x as some header files are needed for the XR/station build.

Running ../newsdk/bin/xrbt.exe build.xrbt all should then place a MINTIA test image at Images/MintiaTest-XRstation-upfre.img. Windows users should use WSL as Cygwin seems to have problems with the SDK. Multi-core builds are encouraged with the JOBS=N argument, where N is the number of cores on your machine.

To build for fox32, add PLATFORM=fox32 and the distribution image should be placed at Images/MintiaTest-fox32-upfre.img.

To clean the source tree, add CLEANUP=1 to the command line you'd use to build.

With the XR/station emulator (./xremu/) and MINTIA repository (./mintia2/) in your current directory, run this command:

./xremu/graphical.sh -dks ./mintia2/Images/MintiaTest-XRstation-upfre.img

If it doesn't boot automatically, type this command at the firmware prompt:

boot dks0s0

MINTIA should boot to the login prompt. does nothing currently!