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

Re:I always wanted to get Minix ..

[IrresponsibleUseOfFr]

Well, now you can download it for free.

Minix

If you don't like the licensing terms, then choose Linux. Since that was like kinda of the whole point.

Linux is a lot of code. But, LOC isn't the most valuable measure of complexity. Although, it can be overwhelming at first. A lot of Linux code won't be of much interest since it will deal with archaic devices and such. But, Linux as an overall system is well-organized. Which will mean as a hobbiest, after you find the parts of system you want to play around with, it should be easy to modify.

The only real part that will screw you is the fact that as a monolithic kernel, if what you modify has a bug, it can potentially affect every part of the system (but usually it isn't so bad). And, this is usually no worse than any C-type coding unless you are playing around with the file-system.

More on-topic, I don't see any reason why you'd want to rewrite Minix. There is always this type of bully-ing going on. It doesn't mean that 3rd parties should run off like a bunch of chicken littles. Plus there are other projects like xBSD's or Linux that are not necessarily easy to contribute to, but nevertheless you will affect a lot more people and gain their accolades if successful. Meh, I guess it is their time to waste and there are certainly other less productive things they could be doing.

Getting Hurd working

[EmbeddedJanitor]

One of the biggest issues with Hurd does not seem to be the basic OS architecture, but rather the lack of support for various file systems, devices, PPP etc.

This could potentially be rectified by building a "File System Manager" and "Device Manager" that support the Linux device and file system models. Then, all Linux device drivers and file systems etc could be plugged into Hurd and used with little/no modification.

The benefit of an exercise like this is that it would push Hurd into "useful" space so that it would become worth putting effort into, and there would then be a microkernel OS with a rich set of code.

For all Linus' comments about "computer science masturbation", there is still a place for microkernels and they can be pretty damn efficient. Having a solid microkernel OS in OpenSource land is of significant value.