How to compile and run xv6 on windows?

Well, there are reasonable instructions on how to construct environment for building and using XV6 under Windows in the site http://www.cs.mta.ac.il/~carmi/Teaching/OS.xv6/index.html.The emulator they are using for actually running it is Bochs.

You can run Linux inside VirtualBox, that would give you the same environment on your machine that you use on the school's server. Then you could continue to run xv6 within qemu. You'll need a reasonably capable machine for this, though -- a dual-core CPU with 4G of memory is the minimum I'd attempt this with.

If you wanna use WSL (Windows sub-system for Linux) on Windows 10, this might help.

Follow Instructions regarding Windows here or

Step 1: enable and setup WSL following this.

Step 2: run WSL bash and install required stuffs on WSL.

• open CMD
• type cd <xv6-source-path>
• type bash and this will switch CMD into WSL bash
• then sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install git nasm build-essential qemu gdb

Step 3: disable video device for qemu in Makefile.

• open Makefile in xv6 source directory with any text editor.

• find the line starting with

QEMUOPTS =

• append -display none to this line and save the file.

Step 4: type linux like commands in that terminal i.e

• first make
• then make qemu

Now if everything is okay, you should be in the xv6 terminal