MTOS is a small, powerful operating environment for OpenPOWER Microwatt on FPGA boards. Some of it’s features include:
- Multitasking, multi-user environment with virtual memory support
- Integrated diagnostic console for development and debugging
- Memory-mapped persistent object storage system
- Integrated support for various structured files
- Supports multiple simultaneous users via block-mode terminals connected locally or over TCP/IP
- Small kernel compiles quickly to enable rapid development iteration
MTOS began as a set of test programs for FPGA hardware development and quickly evolved into a complete operating system. It remains small and simple in order to serve as a development tool for both hardware and software.
SATA interface testing on Wukong v2 FPGA board
MTOS was inspired by IBM i (formerly AS/400) therefore it differs greatly from most other operating systems. Interaction is through block-mode terminal sessions, the byte ordering is big-endian, and storage is provided using a memory-mapped persistent object store. The current version of MTOS offers a simple TCP/IP implementation and storage is provided by a single SATA hard disk. Unlike IBM i, MTOS uses the ASCII character set and requires it’s own special terminal emulator.