Minix from Scratch Project Established

decuser writes "The MFS - Minix from Scratch project was established in the wake of the Brown-Tannenbaum controversy. MFS aims to be to the Minix community what LFS is to the Linux community, a recipe for building an alternative OS from 'scratch.'" See the project's website at mfs.sunsite.dk or minixfromscratch.org.

Comments

Isn't Minix intentionally incomplete?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is my understanding that Tannenbaum never wanted Minix to be feature complete because it is a teaching OS, not a production OS. He often rejected submitted patches on these very grounds. The idea was to use Minix in a teaching environment. By keeping Minix simple and incomplete, instructors could tailor lab assignments to provide missing features and extensions.

Minix is great for teacher and student, but it shouldn't be the first choice for general purpose operating systems. At one time it didn't even have networking (but maybe that has changed).

missing the point

[fred fleenblat]

The tempest in a teacup is over whether an OS could be written from scratch by a single person. Making a shared project out of it fails to prove that a single person can do it. Worse yet, Ken Brown's sense of logic will lead him to cry that it's proof that a single person cannot do it.

It's probably a fun project, but it isn't really going to prove anything new that reasonable people don't already know. And it will fail to convince unreasonable people of anything.

Agree. Better places to put in effort

[EmbeddedJanitor]

How about contributing to GNU/Hurd instead? At least Hurd intends to oneday be a real OS and has a microkernel architecture.

I guess though it is also worth noting that while Minix was only designed for teaching OS concepts it has been used for RealWork. The same happened to Pascal. Nobody was ever supposed to write any RealCode in Pascal - it was also intended only as a teaching tool.