Make OS Independent Software: A Bare-PC Build Tool X86 PCs

Author

Mo Zhang, South Dakota State University

Document Type

Thesis - University Access Only

Award Date

2015

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department / School

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

First Advisor

George Hamer

Abstract

Most current software is designed to run on top of an operating system (OS). While the OS provide task management, user management, and resource management, it also increases the overhead. In the case that only one application is needed to run, the OS overhead is a pure waste during both booting time and running time. Thus OS independent applications are more efficient in such a case. There are applications written to run on bare PC, and there is also research to convert ordinary OS based application to bare PC-based ones. However, there is no automatic tool that can do the above-said conversion. This thesis focuses on developing bareC; a tool that can build from C source code that is written for OS based applications to bare-PC applications. It accomplishes this goal by providing a different C standard library other than the common OS dependent ones, a minimal kernel designed for this purpose, a multi-boot bootloader, and a set of tools to put them together. As tested, applications built by the bareC tool are much faster in both booting time and running time, while suffering a longer build time – which can be reduced by using non-clean build. Besides increased efficiency in booting and running time, increased security is also discussed.

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Operating systems (Computers) Computer software -- Development

Description

Includes bibliographical references (pages 33-34)

Format

application/pdf

Number of Pages

43

Publisher

South Dakota State University

Recommended Citation

Zhang, Mo, "Make OS Independent Software: A Bare-PC Build Tool X86 PCs" (2015). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1869.
https://openprairie.sdstate.edu/etd/1869