To gain experience setting up a Pintos development environment on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), I followed the instructions at Pintos Projects: Installing Pintos🔗 to get Pintos to run on my machine. Here is a recap of the process with additional steps I had to take.

These instructions assume use of Ubuntu on WSL with the APT package manager. This is the experience reflected in this article. For other distros it is mainly a matter of where to get the various packages.

Step 1: Get Pintos directly

For the most current Pintos for this tutorial, I cloned it directly from the source. This was found at Pintos Projects: Introduction🔗.

git clone http://cs212.scs.stanford.edu/pintos.git

Step 2: Pre-requisites

Install the required utilities from the APT package manager:

  • gcc - The GNU C Compiler.
  • build-essential - Essentials for building Debian packages. Also fetches important essentials like the gcc and g++ compilers, and make.
  • binutils - Additional utilities for manipulating assembly and object files.
  • perl - For additional Perl scripts that help to run and test Pintos.

The way to do so is to call apt install with root permission. I.e. to install pkg:

sudo apt update # Once only to update apt references.
sudo apt install pkg

Additional pre-requisites

The following pre-requisites mainly are related to use of WSL. Also check out a.p. 4 as this may be a requirement for building Bochs successfully.

Added pre-requisite 1: Windows paths in WSL

By default, your Windows PATH environment variable entries are also on your WSL PATH. This messes with the build script for Bochs, namely because I have perl installed on both systems. I had to adjust my WSL configuration to not have the Windows path.

Get hold of the configuration for the WSL. On Ubuntu as follows:

sudo nano /etc/wsl.conf

Add this:

[interop]
enabled = true
appendWindowsPath = false

Then restart the WSL:

wsl --shutdown

Finally, reopen your WSL terminal and check:

echo $PATH

Added pre-requisite 2: VS Code with WSL

Without the paths from Windows, I cannot run VS Code from our WSL shell. To get VS Code to work again, add the path to its WSL launcher to ~/.bashrc like so:

export PATH="$PATH:/mnt/c/Program Files/Microsoft VS Code/bin"

Then reload the shell:

source ~/.bashrc

Added pre-requisite 3: X11 libraries

The build script for Bochs will want the X11 libraries for the Windows GUI when on WSL. (This is uniquely a problem for WSL users.)

Here are the apt calls to install those:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install libx11-dev libxext-dev libxrandr-dev libxinerama-dev libxcursor-dev libxi-dev

Added pre-requisite 4: Curses library

This was another hick-up. The build script requires some version of the Curses library:

sudo apt install libncurses-dev

Step 3: Entries in .bashrc

I added these paths to my .bashrc, following the Pintos installation instructions:

# Pintos project
export GDBMACROS="/home/rono/repos/pintos/src/misc/gdb-macros"
export PATH="$PATH:/home/rono/repos/pintos/src/utils"

It is most important to add the utils subdirectory to PATH, because the make check script depends on it to access the pintos perl utility.

Remember to reload .bashrc in the shell after making edits:

source ~/.bashrc

Step 4: Building Bochs

With the pre-requisites fulfilled, I can now run the build script from the Pintos repository in ./src/misc and install Bochs:

sudo sh bochs-2.6.11-build.sh /usr

Here, /usr is where Bochs will be placed. I chose another target initially to test the builder, and I suggest you do the same.

This will run a lengthy build script. When done, I should have access to bochs in the shell. If not, I will check the script printouts for errors to resolve.

Excerpt from shell terminal running bochs:

========================================================================
                       Bochs x86 Emulator 2.6.11
              Built from SVN snapshot on January 5, 2020
                Timestamp: Sun Jan  5 08:36:00 CET 2020
========================================================================
00000000000i[      ] BXSHARE not set. using compile time default '/usr/share/bochs'
------------------------------
Bochs Configuration: Main Menu
------------------------------

This is the Bochs Configuration Interface, where you can describe the
machine that you want to simulate.  Bochs has already searched for a
configuration file (typically called bochsrc.txt) and loaded it if it
could be found.  When you are satisfied with the configuration, go
ahead and start the simulation.

You can also start bochs with the -q option to skip these menus.

1. Restore factory default configuration
2. Read options from...
3. Edit options
4. Save options to...
5. Restore the Bochs state from...
6. Begin simulation
7. Quit now

Please choose one: [2]

Step 5: Testing Pintos

With all the pre-requisites in place, it should be possible to test Pintos. To build and test it:

  1. Navigate to ./src/threads and run the Make file. (make).
  2. Navigate to the ./build just created. Run make check to run the tests.

Some of the tests should pass. Here is an excerpt from terminal of how the tests behave for me on the initial project:

pass tests/threads/alarm-single
pass tests/threads/alarm-multiple
pass tests/threads/alarm-simultaneous
FAIL tests/threads/alarm-priority
pass tests/threads/alarm-zero
pass tests/threads/alarm-negative
FAIL tests/threads/priority-change
FAIL tests/threads/priority-donate-one
FAIL tests/threads/priority-donate-multiple
FAIL tests/threads/priority-donate-multiple2
FAIL tests/threads/priority-donate-nest
FAIL tests/threads/priority-donate-sema
FAIL tests/threads/priority-donate-lower
FAIL tests/threads/priority-fifo
FAIL tests/threads/priority-preempt
FAIL tests/threads/priority-sema
FAIL tests/threads/priority-condvar
FAIL tests/threads/priority-donate-chain
FAIL tests/threads/mlfqs-load-1
FAIL tests/threads/mlfqs-load-60
FAIL tests/threads/mlfqs-load-avg
FAIL tests/threads/mlfqs-recent-1
pass tests/threads/mlfqs-fair-2
pass tests/threads/mlfqs-fair-20
FAIL tests/threads/mlfqs-nice-2
FAIL tests/threads/mlfqs-nice-10
FAIL tests/threads/mlfqs-block
20 of 27 tests failed.

Upon close inspection, the build directory has a subdirectory ./tests/threads. This contains for each test test-name:

  1. test-name.errors with diagnostics output from the Bochs emulator.
  2. test-name.output with the raw output from the test that ran.
  3. test-name.result which either contains the word PASS, or the word FAIL followed by a detailed explanation as expected with Test Driven Development.

Troubleshooting

  • If bochs is unavailable, none of the tests will be able to run at all. See step 4 and back.
  • For the make check script to work, the pintos perl script must be available to run from terminal. See step 3.

Changelog to this article

October 22nd, 2025

  • Advise to install build-essential, as this will get hold of make, gcc, g++ and more dependencies for building for Bochs and Pintos.
  • Made it more apparent that Pintos utils subdirectory will need to be on PATH. Advising necessary addition to ~/.bashrc file.
  • Other small clarifications. Commands for apt. Reason for a.p. 1.