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How about Minix...

Most of the frequent changes in Linux are in drivers, filesystem etc. and not core kernel code.

Minix pushes that stuff into user space, so the kernel very rarely needs to be revised.

BSD is another name for an operating system called Net-2 which was written by Bill Jollitz and Linda Jollitz. It went through several name changes but then it died. Hobbyists still tinker with its remants and have various pet names for their hobby versions. Minix popularized by Andrew Tannenbaum (Bob Dylan's childhood friend) is probably the most popular BSD derived softwares. It uses a cute raccoon named Rascal for its logo. Because of BSD using a raccoon for its logo, BSD hobbyists are affectionately referred to as "coons".

Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands http://git.minix3.org/index.cg...

The Minix3 standard license is four sentences:
http://git.minix3.org/index.cg...

The second clause / sentence of the license is:

--
      * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
        notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
        documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
--

Intel did not comply with that. Intel violated the license. That's a fact. Tanenbaum isn't too mad about it, and that's fine. If he chooses not to sue them that's all well and good, but it doesn't change the fact that they did not comply with the license. Note Minix can ALSO be licensed under other terms - a company can contact the copyright holders to negotiate a different license, which may include payment. Intel didn't do that.

They had no right to make and sell copies of Minix as part of their CPU, since they didn't do so under the normal license.

Many years ago, Minix wasn't open source. It was sold for $69 / copy. After inflation that's about $150 in 2017 dollars. If Intel has unlawfully sold 500 million copies which they'd now need to pay Tanenbaum for - well he could be a very rich man if he chose to. Even at $1 per copy that's $500 million that Intel owes him.

BSD is another name for an operating system called Net-2 which was written by Bill Jollitz and Linda Jollitz. It went through several name changes but then it died. Hobbyists still tinker with its remnants and have various pet names for their hobby versions. Minix popularized by Andrew Tannenbaum (Bob Dylan's childhood friend) is probably the most popular BSD derived softwares. It uses a cute raccoon named Rascal for its logo. Because of BSD using a raccoon for its logo, BSD hobbyists are affectionately referred to as "coons".

Format drive and install one of the following operating systems:

• BeOS
• Syllable
• AROS
• Plan 9
• Minix
• FreeDOS
• DR-DOS
• OpenVMS x86 port is coming!
• Visopsys
• SqueakNOS
• Haiku
• Kolibri
• ReactOS
• Tizen
• SkyOS
• MorphOS
• MenuetOS
• CP/M 86
• Multics, also see Multicians
• Erlang as an Operating System

There have been a large number of more or less obscure operating systems and not all have been ported to x86. Unfortunately the architecture has become a de facto standard even though it's not the best architecture or the most efficient but instead a patchwork of solutions to retain backwards compatibility. We have lost many interesting architectures over the years that would have deserved a better fate to the Intel bandwagon.

Minix 3 is very fault-tolerant. It has what they describe as "self-healing" properties to recover from application and driver crashes without destabilizing the system.

Not for Minix 3
http://wiki.minix3.org/doku.ph...
It targets high reliability and security. I see it as ideal system for NASs, Routers, and VOIP systems. The issue is a lack of developers that are interested in it.

Yes, you can most certainly mount ext4 under Minix, just use ext4fuse since Minix 3 now supports FUSE.

Hell, Minix 3 already sports some binary compatibility with NetBSD...

Microkernels are very complex by comparison, and it's turning out to not be a practical idea. If you want to try one out, go download GNU Hurd, it's a microkernel.

Why would you mess around with HURD when you can play with L4 or Minix 3 ?

You could also try NetBSD which is based on an "anykernel," using "rump kernels" to allow drivers to run in either kernel space OR user space.

All of these are more mature and stable than HURD.

It is now FOSS "BSD" I believe so the source is available on-line. http://git.minix3.org/index.cg...

Amazon wants $123.99 for the Kindle edition, even though it's out of date. I'm sure you can find it *ahem* cheaper elsewhere online.

Although the book is still probably the best place to start if you really want to learn all the details of the code, it describes MINIX 3.1.0, which is quite old now, rather than the current release. A new edition of the book may come out one day, but do not hold your breath just yet.

I'd love to be able to teach on the Pi. But the port to the ARM platform has been stalled. It would be nice to have a Pi port.

Pi is still in the sky, but can't BeagleBone meet your needs in the meantime?

Would it really have been so hard to link to the announcement in the summary:

http://www.minix3.org/conferen...

If your boner for microkernals lasts more than 25 years, you should probably consult a physician.

I recommend a look at Andrew S Tannenbaum's baby:

MINIX 3 is a free, open-source, operating system designed to be highly reliable, flexible, and secure. It is based on a tiny microkernel running in kernel mode with the rest of the operating system running as a number of isolated, protected, processes in user mode. It runs on x86 and ARM CPUs, is compatible with NetBSD, and runs thousands of NetBSD packages.

Minix

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... "Acclaimed journalist, author and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich explores the darker side of positive thinking."

I've written before on how the monolithic Linux kernel design may be significantly increasing Linus' stress as a kernel manager (as the Kernel moves closer to some point of collapse or major security breach from complexity -- of which the systemd controversy is a big symptom).
https://www.mail-archive.com/f...

But I don't see everyone migrating to Minix 3... :-) Or something else.

Tanenbaum's early choice of proprietary license for Minix will go down in history of one of the biggest licensing mistakes of all time -- even if it is free now, and recently had millions of euros of public funds poured into it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://www.minix3.org/

But had we all moved to Minix, we would probably not be hearing that much swearing by Andrew Tanenbaum or other Minix kernel maintainers compared to Linus Torvalds and other Linux kernel maintainers, as with so few core lines, there is not much to maintain in the Minix kernel, and so it is easier to test and debug. See:
http://wiki.minix3.org/doku.ph...
"Monolithic operating systems (e.g., Windows, Linux, BSD) have millions of lines of kernel code. There is no way so much code can ever be made correct. In contrast, MINIX 3 has about 4000 lines of executable kernel code. We believe this code can eventually be made fairly close to bug free."

I feel ultimately that difference is why Linus Torvalds is stressed enough that he spouts so much profanity at kernel maintainers when they make a mistake -- a fact he may never be able to admit? :-)

Anyway, some of this is cultural. By contrast to the USA, people in, say, the Netherlands are more forthright and less quick to take offense (another cultural aspect). In the USA, you never know how quickly your cutting comment might make an enemy (including, say, the above). Anyway Linus, I may disagree on monolithic vs. micro kernel design obviously, but kudos to you for going free early and often!!! And git is great! :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... "Acclaimed journalist, author and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich explores the darker side of positive thinking."

I've written before on how the monolithic Linux kernel design may be significantly increasing Linus' stress as a kernel manager (as the Kernel moves closer to some point of collapse or major security breach from complexity -- of which the systemd controversy is a big symptom).
https://www.mail-archive.com/f...

But I don't see everyone migrating to Minix 3... :-) Or something else.

Tanenbaum's early choice of proprietary license for Minix will go down in history of one of the biggest licensing mistakes of all time -- even if it is free now, and recently had millions of euros of public funds poured into it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://www.minix3.org/

But had we all moved to Minix, we would probably not be hearing that much swearing by Andrew Tanenbaum or other Minix kernel maintainers compared to Linus Torvalds and other Linux kernel maintainers, as with so few core lines, there is not much to maintain in the Minix kernel, and so it is easier to test and debug. See:
http://wiki.minix3.org/doku.ph...
"Monolithic operating systems (e.g., Windows, Linux, BSD) have millions of lines of kernel code. There is no way so much code can ever be made correct. In contrast, MINIX 3 has about 4000 lines of executable kernel code. We believe this code can eventually be made fairly close to bug free."

I feel ultimately that difference is why Linus Torvalds is stressed enough that he spouts so much profanity at kernel maintainers when they make a mistake -- a fact he may never be able to admit? :-)

Anyway, some of this is cultural. By contrast to the USA, people in, say, the Netherlands are more forthright and less quick to take offense (another cultural aspect). In the USA, you never know how quickly your cutting comment might make an enemy (including, say, the above). Anyway Linus, I may disagree on monolithic vs. micro kernel design obviously, but kudos to you for going free early and often!!! And git is great! :-)

Picking AROS or Minix 3.

There is also RouterOS?

Just realize that whatever you do you will suffer some disadvantage.

http://www.minix3.org/

How workable could it be as a general desktop at this point, like to read email and browse the web? And do some development whether with Eclipse or something else, for C, Java, and JavaScript)?

Does Node.js work on it yet?
http://stackoverflow.com/quest...
"Thanks! I did try getting NodeJS to work in Minix3 but it simply did not work, worked with a couple of guys and there are too many unresolved dependencies and its just a pain... I will try other microkernels and see if I have better luck. Thanks for your reply! -- Purefan Sep 15 '11 at 8:11"

Personally, it seems to me we could have a much simpler OS than something UNIX-y based around Forth and Smalltalk somehow... There seems a lot of clutter and inconsistency of naming things in the UNIX world with various abbreviations (especially including command-line programs and their arguments). But perhaps something like Minix as a microkernel could still form a core for that...

Alan Kay's FONC project was a hopeful step in that direction, but I'm not sure it has really delivered more than some interesting experiments?
http://vpri.org/mailman/listin...

But Alan Kay's heart is in the right place, regardless of recent outcomes. It would have been fun to work with him and maybe become the next Dan Ingalls! :-)
http://www.drdobbs.com/article...
"Kay: Yeah. You want to get those from the objects. You want it to be a mini-operating system, and the people who did the browser mistook it as an application. They flunked Operating Systems 101.
    Binstock: How so?
    Kay: I mean, look at it: The job of an operating system is to run arbitrary code safely. It's not there to tell you what kind of code you can run. Most operating systems have way too many features. The nice thing about UNIX when it was first done is not just that there were only 20 system commands, but the kernel was only about 1,000 lines of code. This is true of Linux also.
    Binstock: Yes.
    Kay: One of the ways of looking at it is the reason that WYSIWYG is slowly showing up in the browser is that it's a better way of interacting with the computer than the way they first did it. So of course they're going to reinvent it. I like to say that in the old days, if you reinvented the wheel, you would get your wrist slapped for not reading. But nowadays people are reinventing the flat tire. I'd personally be happy if they reinvented the wheel, because at least we'd be moving forward. If they reinvented what Engelbart, did we'd be way ahead of where we are now. "

I thought Minix 3.4 is already ready. It has Minix at the bottom, and NetBSD userland.

you must have jumped ahead, they are at 3.2.1 and it has very limited software and hardware support

Minix3 support targets BeagleBoard - xM. Is that the same as the Beaglebone mentioned above?

MINIX3 support coming soon, I hope! Minix is booting on the BeagleBoard-xM, so supporting the BeagleBone Black should not be too much of an issue.

Actually, in the release announcement, they clearly mentioned that

There are exciting new developments coming in the near future that aren’t part of this release. For example, the MINIX team has been working hard on MINIX/ARM support, of which significant parts have made it to mainline, yet official ARM support is slated for the near future and is not officially part of this release.

This is a great move on their part, since Minix, w/ its microkernel, is just perfect for embedded systems and aside from routers, those tend to run on ARM based platforms. I recall reading somewhere that they were porting it to the Raspberry Pi, and hopefully, to other ARM platforms as well. In fact, something like Minix is perfect for Raspberry Pi, and once their ARM port is complete, it would be a good kernel on which to base whatever else is needed. In fact, the Raspberry Pi guys would do well to join hands w/ Tannenbaum and offer Minix as the OS of choice w/ Raspberry Pi.

Regarding the stuff about the drivers, it was just the Virtio and VBFS that seemed to be about VMs - others, like Ext2 support were about real filesystems. (I'm guessing that for an OS targeted at embedded applications, things like Ext4, Btrfs, ZFS, Hammer, et al wouldn't be appropriate file systems to use)

It is available under a BSD-type license which will make it more attractive to some companies than Linux which is under the GPL.

Bingo. Linux got very lucky early on and built a lot of momentum, but its restrictive license is an inherent handicap. We're starting to see more and more permissively-licensed alternatives, which, though still behind, and gradually closing the gap. It may be another decade, but, when one of those alternatives becomes good enough, we'll see a tipping point...

MINIX3 is a microkernel OS focused on stability and simplicity. This may make it a good fit for some situations, but performance is lacking. (Damn, I thought I once saw a MINIX3 benchmark on Phoronix, but now I can't find it...) For now, a better bet in most situations is FreeBSD.

--libman

It is available under a BSD-type license which will make it more attractive to some companies than Linux which is under the GPL.

Looking under "Drivers, FS" it would seem that the Minix developers are still focusing on keeping it compatible with qemu and virtualbox, ie, they don't expect anybody to run it on real hardware and use it for real jobs.

How does support for virtual hardware mean they don't expect people to run it under real hardware too? I don't follow your logic. Not only that, your conclusion is directly contradicted by the Minix website:

"Research Projects

MINIX 3 won a grant from the European Research Council for 2.5 million [euros] to further research in highly reliable operating systems. Due to its modular nature and fault tolerance, it is easy to use it as a basis for operating systems research or for a product."

and more:

"It was only with the third version, MINIX 3, and the third edition of the book, published in 2006, that the emphasis changed from teaching to a serious research and production system, especially for embedded systems. A few of the many differences between MINIX 2 and MINIX 3 are given here.

Going forward, we are making a serious effort to turn MINIX 3 into an industrial-grade system with a focus on the embedded market, especially for those applications that need high reliability and availability."

Looking under "Drivers, FS" it would seem that the Minix developers are still focusing on keeping it compatible with qemu and virtualbox, ie, they don't expect anybody to run it on real hardware and use it for real jobs.

How does support for virtual hardware mean they don't expect people to run it under real hardware too? I don't follow your logic. Not only that, your conclusion is directly contradicted by the Minix website:

"Research Projects

MINIX 3 won a grant from the European Research Council for 2.5 million [euros] to further research in highly reliable operating systems. Due to its modular nature and fault tolerance, it is easy to use it as a basis for operating systems research or for a product."

and more:

"It was only with the third version, MINIX 3, and the third edition of the book, published in 2006, that the emphasis changed from teaching to a serious research and production system, especially for embedded systems. A few of the many differences between MINIX 2 and MINIX 3 are given here.

Going forward, we are making a serious effort to turn MINIX 3 into an industrial-grade system with a focus on the embedded market, especially for those applications that need high reliability and availability."

Looking under "Drivers, FS" it would seem that the Minix developers are still focusing on keeping it compatible with qemu and virtualbox, ie, they don't expect anybody to run it on real hardware and use it for real jobs.

How does support for virtual hardware mean they don't expect people to run it under real hardware too? I don't follow your logic. Not only that, your conclusion is directly contradicted by the Minix website:

"Research Projects

MINIX 3 won a grant from the European Research Council for 2.5 million [euros] to further research in highly reliable operating systems. Due to its modular nature and fault tolerance, it is easy to use it as a basis for operating systems research or for a product."

and more:

"It was only with the third version, MINIX 3, and the third edition of the book, published in 2006, that the emphasis changed from teaching to a serious research and production system, especially for embedded systems. A few of the many differences between MINIX 2 and MINIX 3 are given here.

Going forward, we are making a serious effort to turn MINIX 3 into an industrial-grade system with a focus on the embedded market, especially for those applications that need high reliability and availability."

On top of using the archaic and slow Mach and having failed on attempts to move past that, HURD's an hybrid system, not a pure microkernel system. They're running their drivers in kernelspace.

Ironically, there's a free hybrid system much younger than the HURD which already has USB and AHCI: https://www.haiku-os.org/

To get a feel of how nasty Mach is, I recommend grabbing the slides from this talk:
https://archive.fosdem.org/2012/schedule/event/microkernel_overhead.html

Here's three actually free interesting microkernel and multiserver systems with a pure microkernel architecture (drivers are isolated) which are actively developed and have reached major milestones recently:
Genode: http://genode.org/
HelenOS: http://www.helenos.org/
Minix3: http://www.minix3.org/

Any of them three is more interesting than the HURD. Moreover, they mostly have support for AHCI and USB and run on more than just 32bit x86.

Well, Minix, which was previously just a teaching OS, is now one aimed at certain markets, such as embedded.

It was only with the third version, MINIX 3, and the third edition of the book, published in 2006, that the emphasis changed from teaching to a serious research and production system, especially for embedded systems.

Of course, Minix 3 is licensed under the BSD license, since Tanenbaum endorses the BSDL philosophy more than the GPL. That may have been the only reason GNU didn't use Minix 3.

Alright, here's my shtick... It's a great race between two open source software ecosystems: copyLEFT and copyFREE.

The copyFREE side is a more amicable pacifist bunch, with more freedoms and more choices, and it has been gaining ground in the last decade in all software categories but one - the kernels. The copyLEFT side was founded by a bunch of militant hippies trying to destroy capitalism, and it had several years' head start, so its viral licenses were grandfathered into some of the most important pieces of open source software. The OS projects within each team like to share code, and the copyLEFT team can also mooch copyFREE code as well, but not the other way around...

This race is contested on many fronts, and one obscure comparison (that I just came up with) is: while running the race forward, to still maintain support for the 80386 platform. Only UNIX systems (sorry, sorry, sorry) that can run on a 80386 PC (sorry, sorry) with actively maintained current versions (sorry) are to be included. Let's see how the two teams compare:

THE COPYLEFT TEAM:

(1) Linux - now i486, as mentioned in this article.

THE COPYFREE TEAM:

(1) FreeBSD - i486 since 2005.

(2) OpenBSD - i486 since 2007.

(3) NetBSD - i486, "80386 support removed" in 2007.

(4) MINIX 3 - i586, 32mb RAM, 635mb HD.

So it looks like the copyLEFT camp had this little "current UNIX on 80386" advantage, and now lost it...

--libman

Europe's biggest claim to Linux is Linus Torvalds being a Finn, but he has moved to California in ~1996, and is now a US citizen. (I too am a naturalized US citizen, having been born in the USSR.)

The history of UNIX is rooted in AT&T research, and later corporate America, and simultaneously Berkeley, MIT (and I don't just mean that silly GNU hippie), and many other US universities. Top contributors to Linux are American corps! Many contributions also came from English-speaking countries that are culturally closer to US than the US-bashing continental Europeans. Open source projects get contributions from all over the world, but you'll find very few important FLOSS projects where European contributors dominate over North American ones.

So, if you want to make it a contest...

North America has Microsoft (still 83% of Web clients), oldest and most popular UNIXen (BSD's, MacOS X, Oracle's sunset, RedHat, etc), Commodore / AmigaOS, EMC / VMware, BeOS / Haiku, Plan9 from New Jersey, old IBM / HP / DR / Honeywell / Apple / Novell OS'es, etc, etc, etc.

Europe has Nokia, Amoeba, a few obscure UNIX-like systems (MINIX, my dear native U-NAS (Soviet BSD fork), etc), and of course Atari. (Did SAP or Ericsson ever make any noteworthy OS'es? Did I miss anything?)

The contrast is obvious.

The point is that USA (and other national champions of Economic Freedom, most of which speak English and are merely small satellites [topic.ref.pun] orbiting around USA) presently constitute the world's leading civilization, and the bulk of Europe is secondary in its aggregate merit, benefiting from diffusional ("trickle down") benefits of USA's achievements. There's nothing wrong with that, and USA has always acted benevolently toward the Europeans, but when you engage in America-bashing you are in contradiction of solid inescapable facts.

--libman

Here let me give you the link
http://www.minix3.org/other/read-more.html

Actually Minix is trying to make advancements in a few areas.
1. Embedded. Minix is trying to be smaller, lighters, and more modular than Linux which to be honest is pretty dang good.
2. Security. Being a microkernel and having drivers running in user space it is the goal that a security exploit in a driver will not lead to a global aka root level exploit.
3. Reliability. With the microkernel if a driver crashes then instead of all of Minix crashing that driver can just be restarted. So if a video, network, or some other driver crashes the system stays up. If the driver is written so that the code pages are read only then it could be possible to just restart the driver in memory without having to even reload it.
I swear that people seem to really hate people trying new stuff. I like and use Linux but that is what should be cool about open source. We should be seeing new stuff more. Instead we have Linux, BSD, X and people crabbing about Wayland and Minix. Heck if we only picked what was most popular and worked good enough then we would all be running Windows 7 on desktops and laptops and using iPhones.
Really take a look and read about Minix. It has some interesting ideas. Frankly I could see it making a good firewall and or a NAS or SAN server if the performance gets good enough.
 

Open source & costing money are by no means mutually exclusive, as OSI will tell you. Even the FSF would argue that 'Free Software' doesn't mean that money can't be charged for it.

Anyway, in the 90s, Minix was something that you got if you purchased Andy Tanenbaum's book 'Operating Systems: Design & Implementation' for whatever the book cost. The CD came in the book. So essentially, it cost one the price of that book. Today, it can be downloaded from the Minix3 website.

As far as the licensing goes, Minix uses a BSD type of license, rather than GPL, and Tanenbaum seems to think that that would make a major difference in whether organizations would want to adopt it or not. In fact, w/ this latest 3.2 release, looks like Minix is replacing GPL3 software, like GCC, w/ Clang/LLVM, so like the BSDs, they too want to get rid of all the GPL3 stuff. On this issue, I think that before too long, Linux too might want to have a non GNU userland - maybe Chrome OS, rather than be tied to GPL3 userland tools.

What did Andrew S. Tanenbaum clone? From the front page of the MINIX web site: "MINIX 3 is a new UNIX clone".

See: http://www.minix3.org/theses/herder-true-microkernel.pdf

"MINIX’ kernel can be characterized as a hybrid microkernel because it includes device drivers. MINIX’ memory manager (MM) and file system (FS), however, are already implemented as
independent user-space servers.

"The main contribution of this work is that MINIX was fully revised to become a true microkernel operating system. In kernel-space, several system calls were added to support the user-space device drivers, MINIX’ interprocess communication (IPC) facilities were improved, and a new shutdown sequence was realized. In user-space, a new information server (IS) was set up to handle debugging dumps and a library was created to maintain a list watchdog timers. These modifications made it possible to strongly reduce the size of MINIX’ kernel by transforming the PRINTER, MEMORY, AT WINI, FLOPPY and TTY tasks into independent, user-space device drivers."

Here are the lists of improvements of v3 over v2

It lists on the 2nd bullet that
Each device driver (except the clock) is now a separate user process
In other words, in version 2, device drivers were a part of the kernel, and when that's the case, the kernel is not a microkernel.

No, not really. That was the point I was trying to make. Not much there right now.

In the article Tannenbaum mentioned working on some form of either compatibility layer or porting of NetBSD packages. That'll help, but we'll see how long it takes them to pull it off.

ftp://ftp.minix3.org/pub/minix/packages/3.2.0/i686/

Not only does Andrew Tanenbaum have a good handle on polls and vote-projection, but his nerd credentials are excellent.

For C++ I would suggest Qt.
For C I would suggest Minix3.

Qt is probably one of the WORST choices for C++ you can possibly suggest because it has NON-STANDARD "moc" (Qt ONLY) phase to it which is NOT C++ ! Neither are Qt "signals" and "slots" which rely on Qt "moc"! Boy oh boy talk about "bad advice"!

For C++ I would suggest Qt.
For C I would suggest Minix3.

Before anyone jumps on the band wagon and says that we all have perfectly usable user space desktop apps for 28 years in the UNIX world, let me say that it is actually very important that now even Microsoft starts to understand that modularity is the way to go while designing complex systems. Moving various operating system components to the user space is just a logical conclusion of the research done during the last four decades. Look at the direction of modern OSii development, from MINIX to GNU. Started by GNOSIS, KeyKOS, EROS and Coyotos this trend seems to suggest that it is much more natural and reliable to design a secure capability-based system when all of the services are separated from each other. Now when even Microsoft is going in that direction - and it is not a trivial change for them, trust me - we can expect Apple and other OS vendors to follow which is a Good Thing. After all, even if people like you and me are using secure operating systems we still don't want to get spammed and dossed by all of the legacy machines out there. It turns out that the rumors that Microsoft is starting to take the latest research in operating systems seriously turned out to be true. This is good news for everyone.

Every now and then I'll download and play with one of the "alternative" OSs. The box I'm typing this on (a Mac running Lion) has VMware installs of Haiku, Syllable (what AtheOS evolved in to), Minix, and several flavours of Linux. What next? MVS under Hercules, perhaps?

Technically, Minix is the most interesting. Haiku is the prettiest.

...laura

Hurd was a Victim of Good Enough.
Linux turned out to be good enough for most people. People want to be part of something important and want to matter so they tend to work on projects that are popular. Some of it is ego and some of it I fear is that people don't want to feel like they are wasting their effort.
There a lot of projects that really are very interesting that just don't get the publicity or help they need.
Like
The Haiku Project http://www.haiku-os.org/
Free VMS http://www.freevms.net/
AROS http://aros.sourceforge.net/
Dragonfly BSD http://www.dragonflybsd.org/
And Minix 3 http://www.minix3.org/
I really like the ideas behind Minix3 It could be a very interesting project if it gets enough support.

I think the fact that Andrew Tanenbaum riduculed Linux in 1993 for being an "outdated architecture", when Minix just got paging working last year after 20 years of development, encapsulates my point completely.

MINIX 1 & 2 were teaching tools. MINIX 3, which is "loosely based somewhat on previous versions of MINIX," wants to not only be a teaching tool, but also be a serious option for small & embedded systems. Also, this new version of MINIX has only been in active development for about six years.

Anyways, I've rambled on enough. You can read more about it here: here and here

I hope the new OS will be a microkernel one, like L4Ka (or L4 in general) or Minix.

Please people, could someone tell me why is this modded funny? I'm serious, minix isn't a good idea here?

I hope the new OS will be a microkernel one, like L4Ka (or L4 in general) or Minix.

<punAlert>
Well, at least then they could join the Hurd.
</punAlert>

I hope the new OS will be a microkernel one, like L4Ka (or L4 in general) or Minix.

Basically, my thoughts on seeing the headline were "No shit, Sherlock", followed by "I guess Andy Tanenbaum was right, eh Linus?"

Linus's approach has always been "What the hell, throw it in the kernel". The result is that if you try running Linux on something like a Nokia N800 or N810, where there's only 128MB or 256MB of RAM, it crawls and thrashes even with the swap on flash memory.

Meanwhile, Tanenbaum's MINIX requires 16MB of RAM. Good luck getting any kind of Linux to load in that amount of space.

From parent's linked to site:

MINIX 3 is initially targeted at the following areas:

• Applications where very high reliability is required
• Single-chip, small-RAM, low-power, $100 laptops for Third-World children
• Embedded systems (e.g., cameras, DVD recorders, cell phones)
• Applications where the GPL is too restrictive (MINIX 3 uses a BSD-type license)
• Education (e.g., operating systems courses at universities)

And what does the Linux kernel target? Desktop, server, mobile, embedded, and just about everything else in between those on a wide variety of different processor architectures. You're trying to compare a Vespa to a mobile home.

Incidentally, Tanenbaum believes that microkernels are the only way to write an operating system. Microkernels divide various core operating system tasks into separate and distinct processes that communicate with one another via IPC. Linux has an absolute ton of stuff in it, from support for ancient hardware many users have never heard about to new and experimental stuff that a regular Joe couldn't even afford. This is not a problem that a microkernel could solve.

So no, it doesn't look like Andy was right, at least not in this case.

Basically, my thoughts on seeing the headline were "No shit, Sherlock", followed by "I guess Andy Tanenbaum was right, eh Linus?"

Linus's approach has always been "What the hell, throw it in the kernel". The result is that if you try running Linux on something like a Nokia N800 or N810, where there's only 128MB or 256MB of RAM, it crawls and thrashes even with the swap on flash memory.

Meanwhile, Tanenbaum's MINIX requires 16MB of RAM. Good luck getting any kind of Linux to load in that amount of space.