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The End Of Minix?
Otter writes "Minix is best known as the Unix clone for x86 that inspired Linus Torvalds to write one himself. It's pretty much dropped off the map since. The latest patch for XFree86's xterm drops support for Minix. As the changelog notes, 'Juliusz Chroboczek noted it was removed from XFree86 server; there have been no users since 1996.'"
Actually, MINIX alone did not make Linus write his own OS. Linus was dissatisfied with all the OS available then, as he felt they did not fully exploit his i386 machine. Infact, Linus based Linux on MINIX....so if anything, it(Linux) complemented MINIX.
BTW, MINIX was an OS written by Andrew T, to be used chiefly, for teaching his students Operating Sytems. Linux, as we know it today, is a commercial Operating System. Hence it would be wrong to compare the two.
Minix is a toy. But that's not a bad thing, and people are still playing with it.
Minix was written to give some "real-life" examples for a textbook on operating system design. The guy who wrote it wanted to keep it simple, so that it would be easier to understand.
Back when there wasn't a free *NIX, some people hacked on Minix to turn it into less of a toy and more of a real operating system. The biggest obstacle was licensing issues: Minix is owned by a book publisher, and you needed to deal with them if you wanted to do anything with Minix. If you just wanted to be legal to use Minix you could buy a copy of the book, but anything else (trying to distribute on CD-ROM for example) was pretty much impossible.
If Minix had been released under GPL, Linus might have simply written patches for it, rather than ginning up his own project. Linux would have likely never happened, and I would be using Minix to type this rather than Linux. This is nice history lesson about the importance of software licensing.
Anyway, between the *BSD family and Linux, we have plenty of *NIX operating systems to use; we don't need one more that is stuck back at the toy level and has a messy license. So people are not working on Minix to make it less toy-like anymore.
Because Minix is a toy, you can read the book and dive right in to the Minix code base. You can hack around with it and have a good time. As long as people still read the book, Minix will be a useful toy.
The efforts to grow Minix beyond its toy status are dead. Minix itself remains educational and fun.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I would hardly call minix an OS for the X86. You can run it on anything. It's incredibly hackible too. Very unfortunate that college OS classes don't usually use it any more. Very unfortunate that colleges don't usually teach OS classes anymore.
I remember running it on my XT years ago and copying files in one virtual terminal while playing a crappy text based adventure game in another and running top in yet another. It's impressive what you can do when you put your 8mhz and 640k to good efficient use.
It's limited in scope, and easy to understand as the first kernel you disect. Thats what the grandparent means.
The big problem with Minix wasn't technical, but political; any changes that were made to it couldn't be released except as patches (i.e., you couldn't change it and still call it Minix). Linus bitched once that Minix was only usable with a set of patches by a developer other than AST.
So the real influence of Minix on Linux was in the GPL. Linus was certain that he wanted to release his code under a license which encouraged change, because of his experiences with Minix. And in fact, it is the GPL which distinguishes Linux from other x86 Unices such as the BSDs, much more than anything technical.
Most universities teach minix at an advanced OS course. Its simplicity makes it very easy to fathom many major components of today's OS's. Minix runs rather well on VMWare, too!
Why do many TERMCAP databases contain vt100 definitions even though most people use a windowing system of some type? Why is the term tty used to describe your login session/device on many UNIX OS's when teletypes went out of fashion years ago? Why do we still refer to the act of the cursor returning to the beginning of a line as a carriage return?
Most likely the answer is cultural inertia. People are loathe to change things that either work just fine the way they are or simply show no pressing need to change them.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
Anyone who knowns anything about Minix beyond the name of its famous creator and his battle with Linus, would tell you that it's all about the educational value. Had Tanenbaum allowed developers to do as they pleased with it, yeah it would be able to run RTCW and Mozilla, but Minix would lose it's ability to educate CS students. It would be spaghetti code similiar to the GNU/Linux kernel.
As far as I know, Minix is the only OS that comes with a textbook that teaches you how to hack it.
WindowsNT uses the microkernel design
Er, no. It started off as microkernel, but things keep getting but into kernel space for performance reasons: thusly.
If history had changed and Minix took off instead of Linux, would we be better off today with the superiority of a microkernel design?
Hehe.
In conclusion: microkernels may or may not be theoretically `better', may or may not perform better, but they are fuckloads more work to do right.
I learned OSes on Minix, and I have to be thankful that I learned on it. Everything was abstracted enough that I didn't have to worry about the fundamentals of how tricky x86 instructions can sometimes be when all I wanted to do was just UNDERSTAND how file systems and virtual memory worked and interacted...
A few years later, I helped in the lab for a class that was using Linux (probably 1.2 or 1.3 at the time) to do OS education, and while some students did some pretty neat things, there was a lot more struggle just to understand how it all fitted together and to fight with whatever strange bugs the current path release had.
I never really wanted to use Minix as my OS of getting work done (although, for 2 quarters, it was all that was on my PC, so to a degree, I had to) but I was glad to learn under it. Sure, the message passing microkernel may not be the way things are done now, but at least I could write a system call, build a bitmap for marking off inode use, etc etc.
I entirely agree; Minix was never much for Xfree. Visit Andrew T's FAQ:
"Is MINIX dead?
Oh no. Far from it. It is simply focused on the target area it was always focused on: education. The excursion into hackerland was a detour. A co-author, Al Woodhull, and I have rewritten the MINIX book based on the new, POSIX-compliant, version of MINIX which Kees Bot produced. It is still be aimed at having students be able to learn the principles of operating systems and most of a real system in one semester. "
No. As far as I could tell, all the Minix tools were written specifically for Minix, lame C compiler and all.
eh?
QNX is an industry-proven, source-available-proprietary, hard-realtime OS. It's certainly a "serious operating system".
BeOS wasn't a microkernel in the first place.
MacOSX is not a microkernel, despite having Mach (bleurgh) code in it - device drivers are not shielded from eachother as in a true microkernel like QNX.
The Hurd is a collection of interacting processes intended to be based upon a microkernel. Mach-Hurd does indeed suck royally. L4-Hurd should not.
Actually,
he just continues to use and distribute it for educational purposes:
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/minix.html
Google caught up.
Since Minix has been put under the BSD license since April 2000, I wonder why nobody has made an effort yet to port it to embedded systems (PalmOS PDAs with Dragonball CPUs, for example, should be an ideal target). Minix should be much better suited for many embedded applications than the much more complex Linux kernel.
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
Right. Measuring Minix against Linux or any OS with pretensions to be a production tool is inappropriate. For some, it probably reflects an unfamiliarity with the Tannenbaum book and a perspective that began sometime after the the code's initial appearance in 1987.
I own both the first and second editions of Tannenbaum's Minix book. They're both buried in boxes right now, so I can't post a quote, but Minix was written as a teaching tool, not with any intent that it would ever be used a production OS or, for that matter, as a hobbyist OS. At the time, the only way for Tannenbaum to legally use source code as a pedagogic device to illstrate the workings of a Unix-like OS was to write it himself. The typical PC box then -- remember, this is 1987 -- was an XT without a hard drive.
In other words, Minix code was written to illustrate the points Tannenbaum makes in the book and to work on 640k green-screen XT's with one tiny 5 & 1/4-inch floppy.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I'm a bit tired of reading about the Minix vs. Linux debate when its apparent that most don't realize that Tanenbaum et al. did not write Minix as a general purpose OS. Minix was written as a teaching tool for operating systems classes. Tanenbaum has refused to add more "user" features to Minix because he wanted an educational Unix clone students could interact and program with without getting lost. Writing an operating system that a student can understand and learn from is a lot harder than writing an operating system that only already-knowledgable-programmers can work on. So in the future please be kind to Mr. Tanenbaum or at least do a touch of research before blasting him with "in your face Tanenbaum" statements I've read here. I realize siding with Tanenbaum on /. is not a popular position but the one thing that really gets me upset here is when people blast a good man (Tanenbaum) who's done a lot of good work over blind advocacy to on operating system.
Oh and just to make sure I get modded down as Troll...let us all remember this quote from Mr. Tanenbaum's books: "The desire for a free production (as opposed to educational) version of Minix led a Finnish student, Linux Torvalds, to write Linux. This system was developed on Minix and originally supported various Minix features (e.g., the Minix file system)". So yes if you are a Linux fan remember Linux's roots come from Minix so trashing Minix its tantamount to trashing your parents.
The Advanced Development Group at NCR Cambridge, OH was using Minix in their GNOME project in 1987. The GNOME project was an attempt to accelerate object oriented programs and increase processing power on NCR Tower computers. The main goal was to develop a Multibus hardware accelerator card with three Transputer processors(T800's) on them. This hardware accelerator design experimented with a new MMU and cache design that supported object oriented paging and object caching. We initially ported Minix to this Transputer hardware accelerator board. The port took two months but we had Minix running and distributed over 3 Transputers. We also had the previously mentioned licensing difficulty with Prentice Hall, but that did not kill the project. Management kill the project and reassigned us to other projects that had more pressing neeeds.
Thought you might be interested in this then (minix looks like what I need to run on any 486 or lower machines I run across, as my fiance is liking unix, so she'll need a compy...):
HARDWARE REQUIRED
To run MINIX 2.0, you need a PC driven by an 8088, 286, 386, 486, or Pentium CPU. The system must be 100% hardware compatible with the PC-AT and its successors (i.e, EISA bus, IDE disk, etc.).
To run the 16-bit version, 640K is the minimum. To run the 32-bit version, 2MB is the minimum. To run comfortably, another 512K is needed.
A hard disk is not technically required, but is strongly recommended to take full advantage of the system. To load all the sources and be able to recompile the system, 30 MB is the practical minimum but with a 20 MB disk partition, you can still run and compile parts of the system.
The system must have either a CGA, EGA, VGA, monochrome, or Hercules video card, or another card that emulates one of these. Both 5.25" and 3.5" diskettes are supported, as are printers using the parallel port and modems and terminals using the serial ports. Mitsumi CD-ROMs are also supported, as are some Ethernet cards.