Using Embedded Xinu to Teach Operating Systems on Baremetal RISC-V

RISC-V is an open computer architecture that has gained increasing popularity in recent years. Companies such as Google, Nvidia, and Huawei have all announced or developed CPUs based on the RISC-V architecture. The increasing popularity of RISC-V along with its simplicity make it an ideal platform for students to learn low-level operating system concepts. We have ported Embedded Xinu, a simple, lightweight, and education-focused operating system, to a baremetal RISC-V board. Embedded Xinu has been used to teach thousands of students operating systems over the past two decades. This new port is the first education-focused operating system designed to run on baremetal RISC-V. In the following sections, we describe the challenges in porting Embedded Xinu to support the RISC-V architecture. We describe how practitioners can adopt Embedded Xinu to teach low-level CS systems courses such as operating systems. Finally, we reflect on our experience using Embedded Xinu on RISC-V to teach operating systems in Spring 2023.