TinyOS is a very small operating system, built on top of a simple-minded virtual machine, whose purpose is purely educational. It is not related in any way to the well-known operating system for wireless sensors, but since it was first conceived in 2003, there was a name collision that I have not yet resolved. This code (in its long history) has been used for many years to teach the Operating Systems course at the Technical University of Crete.
In its current incarnation, tinyos supports a multicore preemptive scheduler, serial terminal devices, and a unix like process model. It does not support (yet) memory management, block devices, or network devices. These extensions are planned for the future.
After downloading the code, just build it.
$ make
If all goes well, the code should build without warnings. Then, you can run your first instance of tinyos, a simulation of Dijkstra's Dining Philosophers.
$ ./mtask 1 0 5 5
FMIN = 27 FMAX = 37
*** Booting TinyOS
[T] . . . . 0 has arrived
[E] . . . . 0 is eating
[T] . . . . 0 is thinking
[E] . . . . 0 is eating
E [T] . . . 1 has arrived
E [H] . . . 1 waits hungry
E H [T] . . 2 has arrived
< more lines deleted >
Then, you are ready to start reading the documentation (you will need doxygen to build it)
make doc
Point your browser at file doc/html/index.html. Happy reading!
Tinyos is developed, and will probably only run on Linux (its bios.c file uses Linux-specific system calls, in particular signal streams). Any recent (last few years) version of Linux should be sufficient.
Working with the code, at the basic level, requires a recent GCC compiler (with support for C11). The
standard packages doxygen and valgrind with their dependencies (e.g., graphviz) are also needed
for anything serious, as well as the GDB debugger.