16 ms·

Minix 3.3.0

600 points by knz42 12y ago

jacquesm 12y ago
I've upvoted this because I would like to see minix succeed and for nostalgic reasons but I can't help the feeling that minix has missed its window of opportunity. In practically every arena where minix could have established itself there are now formidable entities entrenched with mindshare, budgets and an installed base that minix can't even begin to touch. I've got similar feelings towards plan 9. Even so, minix has a spot, and that spot is in education, an OS that can function like a digital version of a petri dish, something that you can quickly morph to test out a new idea without having to drag a huge behemoth of a kernel behind you. I'm quite sad about this, I think that if minix had been open instead of 'published as a book' that minix would have been what Linux is today only better engineered and that we'd all be better off for that. Not being GPL'd meant that a whole generation of hackers followed Linus Torvalds rather than buying a bunch of books from Prentice Hall. And so now we have 70's era tech instead of 90's.
- thomasfl 12y ago
  If in doubt, open source.
- hrjet 12y ago
  I wonder if it would have ever reached mass adoption. While stability is important, the performance impact due to context-switches might have been big enough for many use-cases.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    That performance impact is a total myth. There are quite a few ways in which you can mitigate a large part of that and in actual use things like latency (which microkernels are very good at), soft-real time performance and context switch speed are far more important than raw throughput. I've built enormous systems using microkernels and there was absolutely no way we'd have gotten the same reliability and performance out of the macro-kernels of the day.
    - huuu 12y ago
      Sounds like this could be the next smartphone os. The kernel would never know about the massive amount of new features / sensors released every month.
- norswap 12y ago
  I'm a firm believer (ok, a wannabe believer) that one day the "whole goddamn corrupt temple" will collapse under the weight of its own complexity; and then we will go back to simpler, cleaner fundamentals. Maybe that will be the time of Minix. But maybe not, maybe it'll be the time of Mirage OS instead. I really wonder what the overlap between Minix and Mirage are btw. Could Minix be used like Mirage as a minimal application-specific OS?
  - dmux 12y ago
    The accumulated filth of all their drivers and patches will foam up about their waists and all the programmers and sysops will look up and shout "Save us!"... and we'lll look down and whisper "No."
  - Ixiaus 12y ago
    I'm not an OS designer or OS programmer so I'm just arm-chairing here. Mirage OS (also Haskell's HaLVm) are layers on-top of Xen. It would seem to me that the microkernel and exokernel designs wouldn't really be used the way Mirage is on-top of Xen except that Mirage / HaLVm could replace much of the userland on the microkernel or be its own os library on an exokernel. The overlap I think you're seeing is that Xen acts a bit like a "microkernel" and Mirage is the userland implementing the lower-level interfaces provided by the kernel. Minix in this sense is a more complete picture but I don't see why Mirage or HaLVm couldn't be "userland libraries" for microkernels and exokernels. I think it's a great idea actually. Build a small kernel with very few responsibilities so it's easier to prove safety, then construct the whole of userland on-top of a known type-safe language (Haskell or OCaml) and you get a potent platform!
    - chubot 12y ago
      I think it's a great idea actually. Build a small kernel with very few responsibilities so it's easier to prove safety That already exists and was just open sourced! See seL4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family#High_assurance:_seL4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family#High_assu...
    - AceJohnny2 12y ago
- metafex 12y ago
  I may have the Plan 9 books on my shelf, but I too think that it is sad that Minix didn't succeed. Nonetheless, the grant from the European Union to fund further development of Minix is something really remarkable. With this Minix got a fair bit of fresh air and much needed work to bring it into this century :) Personally, I'm excited to try it out on a BeagleBone Black and tinker around a bit with it. It just has been too long since OS-dev was fun!
  - winter_blue 12y ago
    > try it out on a BeagleBone Black and tinker around a bit with it I've seen statements to this effect around, and it's kept me puzzled. Why ditch a VM that runs on your main dev computer, and instead opt for a BeageBone, rPI, etc.? With a separate computer (like a BeagleBone), you have to copy over the OS ri it each time after building it, and this takes up a small amount of additional effort and time (that could add up). Aren't VMs are faster for someone who wants to do a lot of tinkering and iterative OS development?
    - metafex 12y ago
      It's basically for the fun of it. Trying out exotic hardware and getting out of your comfort-zone. For me it's just exploring things and maybe a reason to dust off those gadgets and play around with them. OTOH VMs are of course faster, more practical and even sometomes more reliable. For anything serious I'd be using one (and even am, for work, etc.)
    - fSnElPKhpdN6xzY 12y ago
      VMs behave very different from real hardware. VMs are convenient have some very nice features, e.g. GDB debugging with QEMU. But if you're doing anything with hardware, you'll have to test on real hardware or everything will break the moment you do.
- VLM 12y ago
  "minix has a spot, and that spot is in education," Yet they're pushing for reliable embedded hardware. Not all that bad of an idea. Given the nightmare of android security updates (or complete lack there of) this would make a nice embedded controller. Need RTOS features. For .edu or .com embedded use. The microkernel idea is pretty much dead outside the ivory tower, as in practice it didn't work, so I wouldn't be so pessimistic about how things turned out.
  - wolfgke 12y ago
    > The microkernel idea is pretty much dead outside the ivory tower, as in practice it didn't work, The L4 microkernel > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family is really fast and used quite often. See > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family#Commercial_deployment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family#Commercia... for details about its usages.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    > The microkernel idea is pretty much dead outside the ivory tower, as in practice it didn't work A huge swath of the real time world (process and industrial control, all kinds of embedded gear) runs on microkernels. They're enormously successful, just not very visible.
    - VLM 12y ago
      I guess what I'm getting at, is in a fair fight, an open source monolithic always works better than an open source microkernel. Behind closed doors decisions always have other concerns... licensing, support contracts, standardized docs, porting assistance, the list goes on and on. For example, look at the recent minix release notes listing the well known theoretical advantages of a micro when a driver fails. Then look at the actual release notes where ARM USB is broken and crashes the entire kernel, in practice. So with a theoretically superior microkernel design, you could restart a crashed driver in theory, although in practice when drivers crash they take the kernel with them. So you could recover from an error although in practice it doesn't work. With a theoretically inferior monolithic design, you can't (easily) restart a crashed driver. Monoliths work around that problem by not crashing. See linux USB support on ARM. So you can't recover from errors, that don't happen anyway, so in practice it doesn't matter. In actual deployment it doesn't matter anyway because software of a low enough quality to suffer severe driver problems most likely won't live long in the marketplace, and most driver software issues are a symptom of the device hardware being damaged, destroyed, or removed. So if your mass spectrometer A/D converter was vaporized by literal lightning, it doesn't really matter if the kernel crashes; besides the lightning probably vaporized the CPU at the same time. One event like this is an anecdote. A couple is a trend. A couple decades of this in the marketplace, well thats something else.
- jokoon 12y ago
  > And so now we have 70's era tech instead of 90's. You don't seem afraid of angering people with comments like that. I think you're right. But you also have to consider the fact that linux is the only reliable open source kernel which developers know how to use. The mere fact that's it's both maintained, open source and used by many is a big feature. It doesn't have to at the bleeding edge. Even if it's 70's era tech, it's still a good enough tech for many things. Its sole aim is not directly compete with proprietary kernels, it's just because it's just cheaper and more free. I wish minix would get more attention too, but I think kernel choices boils down to what hardware you have.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    > You don't seem afraid of angering people with comments like that. In my 'day job' (as far as I have one) I get paid to speak my mind and not to weasel around the issue, compared to that speaking my mind without 'fear of angering people' in an online forum comes pretty easy and I don't think anybody that really knows his stuff would be angered by this. It is much harder to write a report for a VC detailing a potential investment when every word matters. I can agonize over a report for days in order to make it fair and not to leave ambiguity in.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - jokoon 12y ago
      I agree with you, there are internet trolls, and relevant rants.
- sdegutis 12y ago
  > but I can't help the feeling that minix has missed its window of opportunity Seems to me, it found its window of opportunity in the form of €2.5 million and took it. I would call Minix a success.
- shock 12y ago
  > Even so, minix has a spot, and that spot is in education, an OS that can function like a digital version of a petri dish, something that you can quickly morph to test out a new idea without having to drag a huge behemoth of a kernel behind you. This is why I was surprised to see that the Raspberry Pi, which has a focus on education, was not on the list of supported boards. I would have loved to tinker with Minix on a Raspberry Pi (I have several boards lying around) since I have a latent interest in microkernels. I hope RPi will get supported later.
  - rootbear 12y ago
    I expect a port to the Raspberry Pi will happen. The supported boards are all ARM v7, but the Pi is v6 and that is probably the reason it's not supported right out of the gate.
    - wolfgke 12y ago
      Or the fact that you need a binary blob to boot an operating system on it.
      - me2i81 12y ago
        Or the fact that the board design is not open source, unlike the BeagleBone.
        wolfgke 12y ago
        What do you miss of in the board schematics? > http://elinux.org/RPi_Hardware#Schematic_.2F_Layout http://elinux.org/RPi_Hardware#Schematic_.2F_Layout > http://www.raspberrypi.org/model-b-revision-2-0-schematics/ http://www.raspberrypi.org/model-b-revision-2-0-schematics/
        me2i81 12y ago
        The problem is the copyright: "Design (c) 2011, 2012 Raspberry Pi Foundation All Rights Reserved" As far as I know the schematics are not open-source, i.e. there's no right to use them other than as documentation for the (proprietary) Raspberry Pi-manufactured board. The BeagleBone, on the other hand, has an open-source license for their schematic under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  > Not being GPL'd meant that a whole generation of hackers followed Linus Torvalds rather than buying a bunch of books from Prentice Hall. And as a joke of destiny, most of the open source projects with company funding stay away from GPL or offer dual licensing. > And so now we have 70's era tech instead of 90's. It worse than that, it is actually late 60's. If it were 70's at least we could aspire to have the Xerox PARC environments.
  - lmm 12y ago
    > And as a joke of destiny, most of the open source projects with company funding stay away from GPL or offer dual licensing. They use GPL or something more liberal (BSD), not less. There's no contradiction.
    - pjmlp 12y ago
      I didn't said it was a contradiction. Just that the GPL dream that spread into the mainstream thanks to Linux becoming GNU's kernel, now is less so thanks to more liberal licenses.
- paxcoder 12y ago
  Just because the OS doesn't have a big market share, it doesn't mean it isn't useful for anything other than education.
- tkinom 12y ago
  I believe the OS succeeding in enterprise environment largely dependent on company adoptions. The most objective way to evaluate that for me is look at the # jobs post for that particular language/os/framework in various job site. If I am just grad student/professor wanting to publish interesting paper, Minix/uKernel is interesting. If I am software engineer looking for tech for career development for next 5-10 years, it is Linux. If I am a project manager/Founder/VC looking for the tech foundation/stack for next cool gadgets, server stack and abilities to find season developer, it will be Linux.
- Sanddancer 12y ago
  I'd love to wipe the dust off a bunch of the old research OSes from the 90s. Amoeba, which gave birth to Python, is another OS from Tanenbaum that I feel died much too soon of a death due to the goliath that Linux became. There are so many tantalizing bits and pieces about the network transparency so many of those research OSes offered that have shamefully been left by the wayside. With distribution through a book, at the time, it wasn't a terrible idea. The internet was in its infancy, and there were a lot of schools that had real poor connectivity. Unfortunately, the internet grew rapidly, and textbook publishers are conservative, and the rest really is history. To be honest, I feel there is a near-depressing anti-intellectualism in discussing non-Linux kernels with a number of hackers. They know the devil that is Linux, and fail to see how exploring those other devils and daemons out there could possibly improve their perceptions of what an OS can and should be. Network transparency, non-traditional filesystems, etc, have all been hampered by too stubborn of a refusal to question the assumptions as to what a kernel and OS can and should be.
  - vezzy-fnord 12y ago
    Not only that, but we're even seeing an opposite trend where people are now actually starting to tear down and attack the principles of Unix that were once so cherished. The only problem is they're doing it in favor of adopting concepts from consumer operating systems, which is even worse than sticking to the aging primitives of the 1970s, as the latter at least provide a coherent model. Things are changing in the Linux world. Just not in a particularly positive direction. Moral of the story: Linguistic relativity (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) is real. It doesn't apply just to human languages, but technology as well. People with broken mindsets will carry over their baggage with them and poison even already mediocre environments. More depressing though, is the anti-BSD sentiment present amongst many Linux users. Mostly because of how ironic it is.
    - jfb 12y ago
      e.g., "You can write COBOL in any language".
    - stefanix 12y ago
      The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a bit dated. Comparative linguistics has shown very convincingly that pretty much all languages have a similar set of complex features. Even languages without a heritage, which are invented within two generations have complex features comparable to established languages. There are many good examples in Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct." Similar to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis I think "broken mindsets," and "poison," are exaggerations with little basis. tl;dr It's really not that depressing. There are different ways of doing the same thing.
- psibi 12y ago
  >> And so now we have 70's era tech instead of 90's. That being said, I would really like to know if Minix tech is better than Linux. I have heard the whole microkernel/monolithic kernel debate. But to this day, Linus admits that monolithic is a better design choice. And on the other hand, HURD is a microkernel which suffers from development and I have heard RMS saying somewhere that choosing microkernel was a bad decision.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    > That being said, I would really like to know if Minix tech is better than Linux. No, it isn't. > But to this day, Linus admits that monolithic is a better design choice. Well, that depends. Linus is somewhat invested in the monolithic side of things. If you see the world through a real-time lens and you think of computers as things that simply never get switched off until they are physically end-of-lifed, if reliability and latency are more important than raw throughput, if you want to be able to upgrade your OS without a reboot and so on then microkernels start to make a lot more sense. In the traditional sense, minix is more of a 'small unix' than a micro kernel, the kernel supports all kinds of primitives that you'd not see in other micro kernels. See: http://wiki.minix3.org/en/DevelopersGuide/KernelApi http://wiki.minix3.org/en/DevelopersGuide/KernelApi (For instance, the 'device io' calls are not what I'd expect in a true micro kernel, messaging primitives are not present). HURD is committeeware. L4, QnX and a bunch of closed source industrial systems are real, battle tested microkernels that I would put opposite UNIX/Linux/BSD for comparison, not minix, to me that always was a 'toy' operating system, which just like plan9 never really outgrew the lab.
    - jude- 12y ago
      Out of curiosity, why shouldn't some level of device I/O be handled by the kernel? If the alternative is putting all device I/O responsibility in userspace processes, then wouldn't the kernel still need to do basic driver-related tasks like programming the IOMMU and DMA engine? Even if that's outsource-able to userspace, then wouldn't the kernel still need to run some sort of security-preserving outsourcing logic (e.g. only letting a trusted process access a hardware device)?
- theoutlander 12y ago
  This is fantastic. I started reading Operating Systems Design and Implementation just a couple of days ago. I can see Minix being my secondary OS as I start to tinker with it especially on microprocessors.
- john_other_john 12y ago
  I was one of those who bought books, took weekly reverent hauls at the bookstore, from Prentice Hall, until about twenty plus years ago. I could not bring myself to appreciate Linux as it was, as it could be, back then. But I realized the trend, because I could understand the economics, both financial and cultural. What I think happened to me, was a kind of disillusionment. I saw the progression as a long reimplementation of then already ageing concepts, because there was a genuine need to prevent too much being stalled by myopic business and pseudo or real monopoly. Once Microsoft had their hands on the VMS code, or at least David Cutler (it's a strange story and a car crash that ended his counteract architect, and look where senior DEC management got their sinecures)i felt that all Microsoft had to do for twenty years, was expose functions form the NT kernel, to stay ahead in terms of features. With the only viable chase being a reconstruction of what was by definition much earlier thinking, that had to become the spirited, almost religious, movement behind Linux, or fail. I think that era is over. I don't think anyone won. Not exactly, but I am biased because I will happily consider windows a development platform, with exceptions, and vice versa. I hope that era of chasing against a monopoly is closed, but the massive expansion of installed systems has not helped anyone. Minis or Plan 9 are far better ways to explore computing in a fundamental way, and remain in some ways, more advanced, and if there's a toss up, that can be argued by accessibility. You can't play with the Linux kernel, or with NT, without enormous system knowledge, compared with even ten or fifteen years ago. As a result, we have stagnated the progress of the art. Sometimes I am even more hopeful, for the windows platform, since the win32 system has survived so much, and lived in emulation on its primary system now fifteen years at least. The compartmentalized driver model for NT offers a certain hope, e.g. for storage driver development, because it was well separated by design. POSIX holds everything closer to the system descriptions that were drawn thirty and more years ago. Obviously that is powerful, but it reduces potentially useful abstraction. What hope now, is the research in distributed systems, that first interested me, thirty years ago, and I was not reading up to date papers, then, finds a home, in the mix of virtual machines, virtual datacenter even, we can put into a box. Things like on the fly code recompilation and all that's been done to accommodate usually legacy systems and VMs, did progress a lot of art, and instruction sets developed to accommodate that. Yet, with some instructions that matter to me, they are norm and likely will not be virtualized. Forgive me my hand waving approach, please, but what interests me is when user applications are so many layers away from the kernel, especially in windows systems, I think there is room for approaching again what underlies everything. When ZFS was announced, I immediately craved for a PCI card subsystem for every windows workstation we had. This is now more of a economic quandary, nothing serious stops you building the card and exposing higher level APIs that way. We've performance we can deliberately waste. So much so in consumer space, enthusiast home users, there needs to be a application that takes advantage. My thoughts are that we need better content addressing, than the web has an ability to offer. Content addressing is what the web has enabled, on a massive scale. The network design behind it has caused all manner of diversions for design, just take a look at how a CDN is built, or buffer bloat, or the economic constraints of "real" internet access, which is available in the UK through only maybe two consumer DSL ISPs... To change from the "white coat", "glass room" datacenter model, which has prevailed so well that the company who so accurately proclaimed "The Network Is The Computer" (to mem memorably, in a billboard right outside my office, no place anyone save me and colleagues would ever see much) is part of a classical "mainframe" model company. The next applications that matter, will challenge the infrastructure of computing we use. This is why things like Minis and Plan 9 still matter. Both are great educational tools, but in my shop, I try to get everyone who joins us, to spend some time with Plan 9, to rethink how we appreciate data and content at a low level, and I believe that is really important to my company, the way we think, and will become important much more widely.
- imanaccount247 12y ago
  >I'm quite sad about this, I think that if minix had been open instead of 'published as a book' that minix would have been what Linux is today Why? Even then, nobody thought that. Including ast. Minix was a toy OS, it was designed specifically for teaching, not for actual use. Minix3 is not minix. It just shares the name and the designer. It is a completely different kernel that shares no code. It was designed to be used. That's why minix3 is being used and minix was not.
- tormeh 12y ago
  I'm having the impression that OSes don't really matter for the vast majority of applications anymore; the main advantage of Linux is its licence and development model, by which I mean that it's a commodity. We use high-level languages to abstract away from the OS, and if we want reliability we make distributed systems using technologies like Erlang-OTP or Scala-Akka. The only niche where I see an OS being relevant is in single-computer safety-critical applications and consumer devices. Minix3 aims for the former and I really hope it carves out its own little niche, but I think Linux is here to stay.
thomasfl 12y ago
Minix, the only *nix I've ever modified or recompiled.
indielol 12y ago
I wonder if anybody uses minix in production anymore.
- jethro_tell 12y ago
  I'd love to see some benchmarks if anyone actually does.
  - currysausage 12y ago
    If someone uses Minix in production, they most likely do so because they care about reliability above all else. http://wiki.minix3.org/FAQ#What_is_the_performance_of_MINIX_3_like.3F http://wiki.minix3.org/FAQ#What_is_the_performance_of_MINIX_...
    - SEJeff 12y ago
      No. If they cared above reliability above all else, they'd be more likely to use something like HP's nonstop systems, which are from their Compaq purchase, where were from Tandem. You can hotswap the motherboards of those things with 0 downtime. They run the backend of much of the airline industry (former delta employee). Edit: Links with more information for those not aware of these behemoths: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NonStop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NonStop http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/enterprise/servers/integrity/nonstop.aspx?jumpid=go/integritynonstop&404m=rt404Mb#.VBh8c3VdWEI http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/enterprise/servers/integrity...
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        Or Erlang.
        currysausage 12y ago
        Erlang?
      - boobsbr 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
kathrinalewis 12y ago
Wow that's amazing now we have a Minix 3.3.
peatmoss 12y ago
The choice to use a NetBSD userland isn't hugely surprising in light of the project's focus on making everything as clean and portable as possible. Packages also make a lot of sense. NetBSD did something hugely ambitious with Pkgsrc--it is like FreeBSD's ports, but was designed to build software in a coherent fashion on lots of different *nix platforms. At one point in time, I was using pkgsrc to build a somewhat complicated custom stack of open source software on AIX, compiling with IBM's XLC compiler. Can't say everything worked perfectly, but there was so much scaffolding already in place with pkgsrc that it simplified my process immeasurably.
LeonM 12y ago
Nice to see they have finally gotten to ARM support. I've worked on an MINIX3 ARM port for my thesis. Got really close to a running system but never got to finishing it after I got my degree. Gonna try it out tonight!
ajessup 12y ago
One way to spur adoption, let's see a Yocto BSB for this
minixfan 12y ago
So, can we expect another edition of Operating Systems: Design and Implementation. :)
f2f 12y ago
I feel this document really captures the feeling that OS researchers had at the turn of the century: http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf On one hand you had Windows NT taking over commercial space, on the other you had the Linux juggernaut gathering speed. There was not much left for the niche players. Glad to see Minix survives still.
moo 12y ago
I'm suspicious that some people complain about dated technology and want something fresh not because the dated tech is obsolete or crippled but because they want to be an expert on new tech, starting from a level playing field and not have to catch up with people with a 20+ year head start.
jmcejuela 12y ago
I'm not understanding much from this thread's conversation. I'm not so interested in OS development (anymore). Yet I'm reading the conversation in full due to the great, knowledgable, and foremost polite discussions. Not having seen this in Hacker News in a long time... Thank you all
runeks 12y ago
From a technological point of view, I think Minix looks really interesting. Especially the feature of a driver being able to crash, and not crashing the entire system. Security is also an added bonus. But, it seems to me that it's not really usable for most people, since driver support is very poor. I would really like to know, if anyone knows the answer, how much effort it would take to create some sort of tool that converts a Linux driver to a Minix-compatible driver, or -- if that's not possible -- how many man hours it would take to rewrite ALL Linux drivers to be Minix-compatible. Anyone know?
- justincormack 12y ago
  You can use the NetBSD drivers pretty much anywhere including in another kernel - see http://rumpkernel.org/ http://rumpkernel.org/ - and they are already using NetBSD userspace code in Minix. I was planning to talk to them at eurobsdcon about this, after a few mailing list conversations.
  - reirob 12y ago
    This is really a great project and has big potential in my opinion. Discovered it here on Hacker News some time ago [0]. But it did not get much attention. I would love to hear more opinions from HN on this topic. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8313144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8313144
- vegggdor 12y ago
  For windows to linux there is NSIS. I don't know how it works, but seems to convert something at some point.
  - andrewflnr 12y ago
    NDIS is just the/an API Windows exposes for network drivers, and ndis-wrapper is the Linux technology that enables using NDIS drivers. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Driver_Interface_Specification http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Driver_Interface_Spec...
jamesdavidson 12y ago
This is real hacker news!
luckydude 12y ago
Has anyone benchmarked this? lmbench (I'm biased) or something else?
jingo 12y ago
There is only one question I ask to Minix: How much space and time does it take these days to compile a Minix kernel? The current system I use takes about 220MB of RAM and about 15min on an underpowered netbook. (It is not Linux but still has decent hardware support.) Of course I'm also curious what other folks who compile their own Linux kernels see as their "minimum" requirements.
xyproto 12y ago
Looks cool, but what is this "printing" and "CD-ROM" it is talking about?
stevedekorte 12y ago
AFAICS, Minix's model will win in the end because security will be the most important OS feature in the future. It's a matter of time before our life savings (crypto-currencies), all personal info, and even our lives (self driving cars, medical equipment) inevitably becomes dependent on the security of our computer(s).
- wolfgke 12y ago
  There are kernels available that place more emphasis on security than Minix, say seL4 or EROS and Coyotos for more academic approaches.
fithisux 12y ago
It would b interesting if minix could reuse the work done on mirageos by importing ocaml and build user space drivers in ocaml to be used by other programs.

600 points by knz42 12y ago

I've upvoted this because I would like to see minix succeed and for nostalgic reasons but I can't help the feeling that minix has missed its window of opportunity. In practically every arena where minix could have established itself there are now formidable entities entrenched with mindshare, budgets and an installed base that minix can't even begin to touch. I've got similar feelings towards plan 9. Even so, minix has a spot, and that spot is in education, an OS that can function like a digital version of a petri dish, something that you can quickly morph to test out a new idea without having to drag a huge behemoth of a kernel behind you. I'm quite sad about this, I think that if minix had been open instead of 'published as a book' that minix would have been what Linux is today only better engineered and that we'd all be better off for that. Not being GPL'd meant that a whole generation of hackers followed Linus Torvalds rather than buying a bunch of books from Prentice Hall. And so now we have 70's era tech instead of 90's.

thomasfl 12y ago
If in doubt, open source.
hrjet 12y ago
I wonder if it would have ever reached mass adoption. While stability is important, the performance impact due to context-switches might have been big enough for many use-cases.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  That performance impact is a total myth. There are quite a few ways in which you can mitigate a large part of that and in actual use things like latency (which microkernels are very good at), soft-real time performance and context switch speed are far more important than raw throughput. I've built enormous systems using microkernels and there was absolutely no way we'd have gotten the same reliability and performance out of the macro-kernels of the day.
  - huuu 12y ago
    Sounds like this could be the next smartphone os. The kernel would never know about the massive amount of new features / sensors released every month.
norswap 12y ago
I'm a firm believer (ok, a wannabe believer) that one day the "whole goddamn corrupt temple" will collapse under the weight of its own complexity; and then we will go back to simpler, cleaner fundamentals. Maybe that will be the time of Minix. But maybe not, maybe it'll be the time of Mirage OS instead. I really wonder what the overlap between Minix and Mirage are btw. Could Minix be used like Mirage as a minimal application-specific OS?
- dmux 12y ago
  The accumulated filth of all their drivers and patches will foam up about their waists and all the programmers and sysops will look up and shout "Save us!"... and we'lll look down and whisper "No."
- Ixiaus 12y ago
  I'm not an OS designer or OS programmer so I'm just arm-chairing here. Mirage OS (also Haskell's HaLVm) are layers on-top of Xen. It would seem to me that the microkernel and exokernel designs wouldn't really be used the way Mirage is on-top of Xen except that Mirage / HaLVm could replace much of the userland on the microkernel or be its own os library on an exokernel. The overlap I think you're seeing is that Xen acts a bit like a "microkernel" and Mirage is the userland implementing the lower-level interfaces provided by the kernel. Minix in this sense is a more complete picture but I don't see why Mirage or HaLVm couldn't be "userland libraries" for microkernels and exokernels. I think it's a great idea actually. Build a small kernel with very few responsibilities so it's easier to prove safety, then construct the whole of userland on-top of a known type-safe language (Haskell or OCaml) and you get a potent platform!
  - chubot 12y ago
    I think it's a great idea actually. Build a small kernel with very few responsibilities so it's easier to prove safety That already exists and was just open sourced! See seL4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family#High_assurance:_seL4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family#High_assu...
  - AceJohnny2 12y ago
metafex 12y ago
I may have the Plan 9 books on my shelf, but I too think that it is sad that Minix didn't succeed. Nonetheless, the grant from the European Union to fund further development of Minix is something really remarkable. With this Minix got a fair bit of fresh air and much needed work to bring it into this century :) Personally, I'm excited to try it out on a BeagleBone Black and tinker around a bit with it. It just has been too long since OS-dev was fun!
- winter_blue 12y ago
  > try it out on a BeagleBone Black and tinker around a bit with it I've seen statements to this effect around, and it's kept me puzzled. Why ditch a VM that runs on your main dev computer, and instead opt for a BeageBone, rPI, etc.? With a separate computer (like a BeagleBone), you have to copy over the OS ri it each time after building it, and this takes up a small amount of additional effort and time (that could add up). Aren't VMs are faster for someone who wants to do a lot of tinkering and iterative OS development?
  - metafex 12y ago
    It's basically for the fun of it. Trying out exotic hardware and getting out of your comfort-zone. For me it's just exploring things and maybe a reason to dust off those gadgets and play around with them. OTOH VMs are of course faster, more practical and even sometomes more reliable. For anything serious I'd be using one (and even am, for work, etc.)
  - fSnElPKhpdN6xzY 12y ago
    VMs behave very different from real hardware. VMs are convenient have some very nice features, e.g. GDB debugging with QEMU. But if you're doing anything with hardware, you'll have to test on real hardware or everything will break the moment you do.
VLM 12y ago
"minix has a spot, and that spot is in education," Yet they're pushing for reliable embedded hardware. Not all that bad of an idea. Given the nightmare of android security updates (or complete lack there of) this would make a nice embedded controller. Need RTOS features. For .edu or .com embedded use. The microkernel idea is pretty much dead outside the ivory tower, as in practice it didn't work, so I wouldn't be so pessimistic about how things turned out.
- wolfgke 12y ago
  > The microkernel idea is pretty much dead outside the ivory tower, as in practice it didn't work, The L4 microkernel > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family is really fast and used quite often. See > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family#Commercial_deployment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family#Commercia... for details about its usages.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  > The microkernel idea is pretty much dead outside the ivory tower, as in practice it didn't work A huge swath of the real time world (process and industrial control, all kinds of embedded gear) runs on microkernels. They're enormously successful, just not very visible.
  - VLM 12y ago
    I guess what I'm getting at, is in a fair fight, an open source monolithic always works better than an open source microkernel. Behind closed doors decisions always have other concerns... licensing, support contracts, standardized docs, porting assistance, the list goes on and on. For example, look at the recent minix release notes listing the well known theoretical advantages of a micro when a driver fails. Then look at the actual release notes where ARM USB is broken and crashes the entire kernel, in practice. So with a theoretically superior microkernel design, you could restart a crashed driver in theory, although in practice when drivers crash they take the kernel with them. So you could recover from an error although in practice it doesn't work. With a theoretically inferior monolithic design, you can't (easily) restart a crashed driver. Monoliths work around that problem by not crashing. See linux USB support on ARM. So you can't recover from errors, that don't happen anyway, so in practice it doesn't matter. In actual deployment it doesn't matter anyway because software of a low enough quality to suffer severe driver problems most likely won't live long in the marketplace, and most driver software issues are a symptom of the device hardware being damaged, destroyed, or removed. So if your mass spectrometer A/D converter was vaporized by literal lightning, it doesn't really matter if the kernel crashes; besides the lightning probably vaporized the CPU at the same time. One event like this is an anecdote. A couple is a trend. A couple decades of this in the marketplace, well thats something else.
jokoon 12y ago
> And so now we have 70's era tech instead of 90's. You don't seem afraid of angering people with comments like that. I think you're right. But you also have to consider the fact that linux is the only reliable open source kernel which developers know how to use. The mere fact that's it's both maintained, open source and used by many is a big feature. It doesn't have to at the bleeding edge. Even if it's 70's era tech, it's still a good enough tech for many things. Its sole aim is not directly compete with proprietary kernels, it's just because it's just cheaper and more free. I wish minix would get more attention too, but I think kernel choices boils down to what hardware you have.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  > You don't seem afraid of angering people with comments like that. In my 'day job' (as far as I have one) I get paid to speak my mind and not to weasel around the issue, compared to that speaking my mind without 'fear of angering people' in an online forum comes pretty easy and I don't think anybody that really knows his stuff would be angered by this. It is much harder to write a report for a VC detailing a potential investment when every word matters. I can agonize over a report for days in order to make it fair and not to leave ambiguity in.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - jokoon 12y ago
    I agree with you, there are internet trolls, and relevant rants.
sdegutis 12y ago
> but I can't help the feeling that minix has missed its window of opportunity Seems to me, it found its window of opportunity in the form of €2.5 million and took it. I would call Minix a success.
shock 12y ago
> Even so, minix has a spot, and that spot is in education, an OS that can function like a digital version of a petri dish, something that you can quickly morph to test out a new idea without having to drag a huge behemoth of a kernel behind you. This is why I was surprised to see that the Raspberry Pi, which has a focus on education, was not on the list of supported boards. I would have loved to tinker with Minix on a Raspberry Pi (I have several boards lying around) since I have a latent interest in microkernels. I hope RPi will get supported later.
- rootbear 12y ago
  I expect a port to the Raspberry Pi will happen. The supported boards are all ARM v7, but the Pi is v6 and that is probably the reason it's not supported right out of the gate.
  - wolfgke 12y ago
    Or the fact that you need a binary blob to boot an operating system on it.
    - me2i81 12y ago
      Or the fact that the board design is not open source, unlike the BeagleBone.
      - wolfgke 12y ago
        What do you miss of in the board schematics? > http://elinux.org/RPi_Hardware#Schematic_.2F_Layout http://elinux.org/RPi_Hardware#Schematic_.2F_Layout > http://www.raspberrypi.org/model-b-revision-2-0-schematics/ http://www.raspberrypi.org/model-b-revision-2-0-schematics/
        me2i81 12y ago
        The problem is the copyright: "Design (c) 2011, 2012 Raspberry Pi Foundation All Rights Reserved" As far as I know the schematics are not open-source, i.e. there's no right to use them other than as documentation for the (proprietary) Raspberry Pi-manufactured board. The BeagleBone, on the other hand, has an open-source license for their schematic under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
pjmlp 12y ago
> Not being GPL'd meant that a whole generation of hackers followed Linus Torvalds rather than buying a bunch of books from Prentice Hall. And as a joke of destiny, most of the open source projects with company funding stay away from GPL or offer dual licensing. > And so now we have 70's era tech instead of 90's. It worse than that, it is actually late 60's. If it were 70's at least we could aspire to have the Xerox PARC environments.
- lmm 12y ago
  > And as a joke of destiny, most of the open source projects with company funding stay away from GPL or offer dual licensing. They use GPL or something more liberal (BSD), not less. There's no contradiction.
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    I didn't said it was a contradiction. Just that the GPL dream that spread into the mainstream thanks to Linux becoming GNU's kernel, now is less so thanks to more liberal licenses.
paxcoder 12y ago
Just because the OS doesn't have a big market share, it doesn't mean it isn't useful for anything other than education.
tkinom 12y ago
I believe the OS succeeding in enterprise environment largely dependent on company adoptions. The most objective way to evaluate that for me is look at the # jobs post for that particular language/os/framework in various job site. If I am just grad student/professor wanting to publish interesting paper, Minix/uKernel is interesting. If I am software engineer looking for tech for career development for next 5-10 years, it is Linux. If I am a project manager/Founder/VC looking for the tech foundation/stack for next cool gadgets, server stack and abilities to find season developer, it will be Linux.
Sanddancer 12y ago
I'd love to wipe the dust off a bunch of the old research OSes from the 90s. Amoeba, which gave birth to Python, is another OS from Tanenbaum that I feel died much too soon of a death due to the goliath that Linux became. There are so many tantalizing bits and pieces about the network transparency so many of those research OSes offered that have shamefully been left by the wayside. With distribution through a book, at the time, it wasn't a terrible idea. The internet was in its infancy, and there were a lot of schools that had real poor connectivity. Unfortunately, the internet grew rapidly, and textbook publishers are conservative, and the rest really is history. To be honest, I feel there is a near-depressing anti-intellectualism in discussing non-Linux kernels with a number of hackers. They know the devil that is Linux, and fail to see how exploring those other devils and daemons out there could possibly improve their perceptions of what an OS can and should be. Network transparency, non-traditional filesystems, etc, have all been hampered by too stubborn of a refusal to question the assumptions as to what a kernel and OS can and should be.
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  Not only that, but we're even seeing an opposite trend where people are now actually starting to tear down and attack the principles of Unix that were once so cherished. The only problem is they're doing it in favor of adopting concepts from consumer operating systems, which is even worse than sticking to the aging primitives of the 1970s, as the latter at least provide a coherent model. Things are changing in the Linux world. Just not in a particularly positive direction. Moral of the story: Linguistic relativity (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) is real. It doesn't apply just to human languages, but technology as well. People with broken mindsets will carry over their baggage with them and poison even already mediocre environments. More depressing though, is the anti-BSD sentiment present amongst many Linux users. Mostly because of how ironic it is.
  - jfb 12y ago
    e.g., "You can write COBOL in any language".
  - stefanix 12y ago
    The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a bit dated. Comparative linguistics has shown very convincingly that pretty much all languages have a similar set of complex features. Even languages without a heritage, which are invented within two generations have complex features comparable to established languages. There are many good examples in Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct." Similar to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis I think "broken mindsets," and "poison," are exaggerations with little basis. tl;dr It's really not that depressing. There are different ways of doing the same thing.
psibi 12y ago
>> And so now we have 70's era tech instead of 90's. That being said, I would really like to know if Minix tech is better than Linux. I have heard the whole microkernel/monolithic kernel debate. But to this day, Linus admits that monolithic is a better design choice. And on the other hand, HURD is a microkernel which suffers from development and I have heard RMS saying somewhere that choosing microkernel was a bad decision.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  > That being said, I would really like to know if Minix tech is better than Linux. No, it isn't. > But to this day, Linus admits that monolithic is a better design choice. Well, that depends. Linus is somewhat invested in the monolithic side of things. If you see the world through a real-time lens and you think of computers as things that simply never get switched off until they are physically end-of-lifed, if reliability and latency are more important than raw throughput, if you want to be able to upgrade your OS without a reboot and so on then microkernels start to make a lot more sense. In the traditional sense, minix is more of a 'small unix' than a micro kernel, the kernel supports all kinds of primitives that you'd not see in other micro kernels. See: http://wiki.minix3.org/en/DevelopersGuide/KernelApi http://wiki.minix3.org/en/DevelopersGuide/KernelApi (For instance, the 'device io' calls are not what I'd expect in a true micro kernel, messaging primitives are not present). HURD is committeeware. L4, QnX and a bunch of closed source industrial systems are real, battle tested microkernels that I would put opposite UNIX/Linux/BSD for comparison, not minix, to me that always was a 'toy' operating system, which just like plan9 never really outgrew the lab.
  - jude- 12y ago
    Out of curiosity, why shouldn't some level of device I/O be handled by the kernel? If the alternative is putting all device I/O responsibility in userspace processes, then wouldn't the kernel still need to do basic driver-related tasks like programming the IOMMU and DMA engine? Even if that's outsource-able to userspace, then wouldn't the kernel still need to run some sort of security-preserving outsourcing logic (e.g. only letting a trusted process access a hardware device)?
theoutlander 12y ago
This is fantastic. I started reading Operating Systems Design and Implementation just a couple of days ago. I can see Minix being my secondary OS as I start to tinker with it especially on microprocessors.
john_other_john 12y ago
I was one of those who bought books, took weekly reverent hauls at the bookstore, from Prentice Hall, until about twenty plus years ago. I could not bring myself to appreciate Linux as it was, as it could be, back then. But I realized the trend, because I could understand the economics, both financial and cultural. What I think happened to me, was a kind of disillusionment. I saw the progression as a long reimplementation of then already ageing concepts, because there was a genuine need to prevent too much being stalled by myopic business and pseudo or real monopoly. Once Microsoft had their hands on the VMS code, or at least David Cutler (it's a strange story and a car crash that ended his counteract architect, and look where senior DEC management got their sinecures)i felt that all Microsoft had to do for twenty years, was expose functions form the NT kernel, to stay ahead in terms of features. With the only viable chase being a reconstruction of what was by definition much earlier thinking, that had to become the spirited, almost religious, movement behind Linux, or fail. I think that era is over. I don't think anyone won. Not exactly, but I am biased because I will happily consider windows a development platform, with exceptions, and vice versa. I hope that era of chasing against a monopoly is closed, but the massive expansion of installed systems has not helped anyone. Minis or Plan 9 are far better ways to explore computing in a fundamental way, and remain in some ways, more advanced, and if there's a toss up, that can be argued by accessibility. You can't play with the Linux kernel, or with NT, without enormous system knowledge, compared with even ten or fifteen years ago. As a result, we have stagnated the progress of the art. Sometimes I am even more hopeful, for the windows platform, since the win32 system has survived so much, and lived in emulation on its primary system now fifteen years at least. The compartmentalized driver model for NT offers a certain hope, e.g. for storage driver development, because it was well separated by design. POSIX holds everything closer to the system descriptions that were drawn thirty and more years ago. Obviously that is powerful, but it reduces potentially useful abstraction. What hope now, is the research in distributed systems, that first interested me, thirty years ago, and I was not reading up to date papers, then, finds a home, in the mix of virtual machines, virtual datacenter even, we can put into a box. Things like on the fly code recompilation and all that's been done to accommodate usually legacy systems and VMs, did progress a lot of art, and instruction sets developed to accommodate that. Yet, with some instructions that matter to me, they are norm and likely will not be virtualized. Forgive me my hand waving approach, please, but what interests me is when user applications are so many layers away from the kernel, especially in windows systems, I think there is room for approaching again what underlies everything. When ZFS was announced, I immediately craved for a PCI card subsystem for every windows workstation we had. This is now more of a economic quandary, nothing serious stops you building the card and exposing higher level APIs that way. We've performance we can deliberately waste. So much so in consumer space, enthusiast home users, there needs to be a application that takes advantage. My thoughts are that we need better content addressing, than the web has an ability to offer. Content addressing is what the web has enabled, on a massive scale. The network design behind it has caused all manner of diversions for design, just take a look at how a CDN is built, or buffer bloat, or the economic constraints of "real" internet access, which is available in the UK through only maybe two consumer DSL ISPs... To change from the "white coat", "glass room" datacenter model, which has prevailed so well that the company who so accurately proclaimed "The Network Is The Computer" (to mem memorably, in a billboard right outside my office, no place anyone save me and colleagues would ever see much) is part of a classical "mainframe" model company. The next applications that matter, will challenge the infrastructure of computing we use. This is why things like Minis and Plan 9 still matter. Both are great educational tools, but in my shop, I try to get everyone who joins us, to spend some time with Plan 9, to rethink how we appreciate data and content at a low level, and I believe that is really important to my company, the way we think, and will become important much more widely.
imanaccount247 12y ago
>I'm quite sad about this, I think that if minix had been open instead of 'published as a book' that minix would have been what Linux is today Why? Even then, nobody thought that. Including ast. Minix was a toy OS, it was designed specifically for teaching, not for actual use. Minix3 is not minix. It just shares the name and the designer. It is a completely different kernel that shares no code. It was designed to be used. That's why minix3 is being used and minix was not.
tormeh 12y ago
I'm having the impression that OSes don't really matter for the vast majority of applications anymore; the main advantage of Linux is its licence and development model, by which I mean that it's a commodity. We use high-level languages to abstract away from the OS, and if we want reliability we make distributed systems using technologies like Erlang-OTP or Scala-Akka. The only niche where I see an OS being relevant is in single-computer safety-critical applications and consumer devices. Minix3 aims for the former and I really hope it carves out its own little niche, but I think Linux is here to stay.

thomasfl 12y ago

Minix, the only *nix I've ever modified or recompiled.

indielol 12y ago

I wonder if anybody uses minix in production anymore.

jethro_tell 12y ago
I'd love to see some benchmarks if anyone actually does.
- currysausage 12y ago
  If someone uses Minix in production, they most likely do so because they care about reliability above all else. http://wiki.minix3.org/FAQ#What_is_the_performance_of_MINIX_3_like.3F http://wiki.minix3.org/FAQ#What_is_the_performance_of_MINIX_...
  - SEJeff 12y ago
    No. If they cared above reliability above all else, they'd be more likely to use something like HP's nonstop systems, which are from their Compaq purchase, where were from Tandem. You can hotswap the motherboards of those things with 0 downtime. They run the backend of much of the airline industry (former delta employee). Edit: Links with more information for those not aware of these behemoths: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NonStop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NonStop http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/enterprise/servers/integrity/nonstop.aspx?jumpid=go/integritynonstop&404m=rt404Mb#.VBh8c3VdWEI http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/enterprise/servers/integrity...
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      Or Erlang.
      - currysausage 12y ago
        Erlang?
    - boobsbr 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

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kathrinalewis 12y ago

Wow that's amazing now we have a Minix 3.3.

peatmoss 12y ago

The choice to use a NetBSD userland isn't hugely surprising in light of the project's focus on making everything as clean and portable as possible. Packages also make a lot of sense. NetBSD did something hugely ambitious with Pkgsrc--it is like FreeBSD's ports, but was designed to build software in a coherent fashion on lots of different *nix platforms. At one point in time, I was using pkgsrc to build a somewhat complicated custom stack of open source software on AIX, compiling with IBM's XLC compiler. Can't say everything worked perfectly, but there was so much scaffolding already in place with pkgsrc that it simplified my process immeasurably.

LeonM 12y ago

Nice to see they have finally gotten to ARM support. I've worked on an MINIX3 ARM port for my thesis. Got really close to a running system but never got to finishing it after I got my degree. Gonna try it out tonight!

ajessup 12y ago

One way to spur adoption, let's see a Yocto BSB for this

minixfan 12y ago

So, can we expect another edition of Operating Systems: Design and Implementation. :)

f2f 12y ago

I feel this document really captures the feeling that OS researchers had at the turn of the century: http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf On one hand you had Windows NT taking over commercial space, on the other you had the Linux juggernaut gathering speed. There was not much left for the niche players. Glad to see Minix survives still.

moo 12y ago

I'm suspicious that some people complain about dated technology and want something fresh not because the dated tech is obsolete or crippled but because they want to be an expert on new tech, starting from a level playing field and not have to catch up with people with a 20+ year head start.

jmcejuela 12y ago

I'm not understanding much from this thread's conversation. I'm not so interested in OS development (anymore). Yet I'm reading the conversation in full due to the great, knowledgable, and foremost polite discussions. Not having seen this in Hacker News in a long time... Thank you all

runeks 12y ago

From a technological point of view, I think Minix looks really interesting. Especially the feature of a driver being able to crash, and not crashing the entire system. Security is also an added bonus. But, it seems to me that it's not really usable for most people, since driver support is very poor. I would really like to know, if anyone knows the answer, how much effort it would take to create some sort of tool that converts a Linux driver to a Minix-compatible driver, or -- if that's not possible -- how many man hours it would take to rewrite ALL Linux drivers to be Minix-compatible. Anyone know?

justincormack 12y ago
You can use the NetBSD drivers pretty much anywhere including in another kernel - see http://rumpkernel.org/ http://rumpkernel.org/ - and they are already using NetBSD userspace code in Minix. I was planning to talk to them at eurobsdcon about this, after a few mailing list conversations.
- reirob 12y ago
  This is really a great project and has big potential in my opinion. Discovered it here on Hacker News some time ago [0]. But it did not get much attention. I would love to hear more opinions from HN on this topic. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8313144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8313144
vegggdor 12y ago
For windows to linux there is NSIS. I don't know how it works, but seems to convert something at some point.
- andrewflnr 12y ago
  NDIS is just the/an API Windows exposes for network drivers, and ndis-wrapper is the Linux technology that enables using NDIS drivers. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Driver_Interface_Specification http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Driver_Interface_Spec...

jamesdavidson 12y ago

This is real hacker news!

luckydude 12y ago

Has anyone benchmarked this? lmbench (I'm biased) or something else?

jingo 12y ago

There is only one question I ask to Minix: How much space and time does it take these days to compile a Minix kernel? The current system I use takes about 220MB of RAM and about 15min on an underpowered netbook. (It is not Linux but still has decent hardware support.) Of course I'm also curious what other folks who compile their own Linux kernels see as their "minimum" requirements.

xyproto 12y ago

Looks cool, but what is this "printing" and "CD-ROM" it is talking about?

stevedekorte 12y ago

AFAICS, Minix's model will win in the end because security will be the most important OS feature in the future. It's a matter of time before our life savings (crypto-currencies), all personal info, and even our lives (self driving cars, medical equipment) inevitably becomes dependent on the security of our computer(s).

wolfgke 12y ago
There are kernels available that place more emphasis on security than Minix, say seL4 or EROS and Coyotos for more academic approaches.

fithisux 12y ago

It would b interesting if minix could reuse the work done on mirageos by importing ocaml and build user space drivers in ocaml to be used by other programs.