It was created at
Stanford University by Ben Pfaff in 2004. It originated as a replacement for
Not Another Completely Heuristic Operating System (Nachos), a similar system originally developed at
UC Berkeley by
Thomas E. Anderson, and was designed along similar lines.
Comparison to Nachos Like Nachos, Pintos is intended to introduce undergraduates to concepts in operating system design and implementation by requiring them to implement significant portions of a real operating system, including
thread and memory management and file system access. Pintos also teaches students valuable
debugging skills. Unlike Nachos, Pintos can run on actual x86 hardware, though it is often run atop an x86 emulator, such as
Bochs or
QEMU. Nachos, by contrast, runs as a user process on a host operating system, and targets the
MIPS architecture (Nachos code must run atop a MIPS simulator). Pintos and its accompanying assignments are also written in the programming language
C instead of
C++ (used for original Nachos) or
Java (used for Nachos 5.0j). == Compared to other teaching operating systems ==