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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.
http://saveie6.com/
Wasn't Minix already built as much "from scratch" as Linux was?
Minix is great for teaching about OS's - I cut my teeth on it running on an Atari ST, but a proper distro? There's something missing here... oh yes, the point..
The problem was that it cost money :P I always wanted to mess around the code on a simple, yet an operating system you could DO something with.
Don't say "Linux!". Have you SEEN how many lines of code that is? I just a lowly hobbyist.
This could lead to the second coming of Linus !!! Let us rejoice and sacrafice junior VB coders to the Gods of Code.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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).
How about a "DOS from scratch" project? That ought to drive Microsoft NUTS!
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.
Let's break it down...
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.'
MSF: nope. NO clue. Macworld San Francisco? Microsoft foundation?
Minix: something to do with MINI-coopers? Maybe a followup to the MINI/iPod story?
Brown-Tannenbaum controversy: eh? Sorta like the Bill-Monica controversy? I have no clue.
LSF: what? Lakers Soundly Fucked?
As you can see, this story sparked my imagination. I hope it was as entertaining for you as it was for me.
And no peeking at the answers in the back of the book!
There's just one thing missing from the site - the actual Minix from scratch instructions.
Lacking the instructions, this still looks cool and something I'll try in my spare time. Based on the relative differences, this looks a lot more doable timewise than Linux fron Scratch, just based on the relative difference in sizes between the two.
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.
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Ken Brown was full of shit and was quickly debunked by most of those he interviewed and the guy he hired to compare the code. The only controversy exists in his delusional mind and in the minds of other nutjobs. Even MS has distanced themselves from this FUD project, as Ken Brown is so clearly a fool.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
It's interesting to see Tannenbaum's influence on Senn:
"I have to be upfront with you, I am a fair newbie at Minix. I have been using Linux since the 0.9 kernel (downloaded via ftp on VMS in 90s) and have a fairly decent background in Unix - solaris, sco, bsd, etc. I got interested in Minix back around the same time too, but I had success with Linux and stayed with it. I got reminded of Minix the other day when Andrew Tanenbaum posted his response to the 'Brown' book - pure enlightenment - http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/."[emphasis added]
Here is some more background infoon the genesis of the project.
Hasn't HURD been trying this for 15 years?
Back in 1992 or 1993, a unix admin suggested that I check out a PC unix called "minix." Back then, "googling" consisted of connecting a ftp clinet to ftp.wustl.edu and manually traversing the directory structure looking for something interesting. I don't remember if it was at ftp.wustl.edu or sunsite.unc.edu, or even on usenet, but I eventually stumbled across this PC unix called "linux." It sounded right, so I went with it.
Months later, I spoke to the admin again, and found that I was mistaken. Rather than type in thousands of lines of code for an 8086 unix kernel, I had a fully functional linux workstation with X11, ethernet and all the rest of the good stuff that we take for granted today but were PC fantasies in the Windows 3.0 days.
Question: is the current MINIX licence GPL-compatible? I've given it a scan and it seems pretty liberal. Is it possible or feasible for code to be taken from linux (or vice versa) within the remit of these licences?
Slashdot should stop promoting projects that have nothing more than a Web page.
MFS looks like it's trying to write a manual for installing Minix. That's fine, but will it really teach "operating system design concepts"? Wouldn't Tanenbaum's textbook be better for that? Linux From Scratch teaches you a lot about Linux, but it doesn't teach you how the kernel works.
Just look at all the valuable information available on the MFS Wiki. Lots of useful information suggesting hours and hours of labor by Minix users everywhere. I predict this will be the Next Big Thing. Minix installations everywhere, sweeping the nation, sweeping the world, while Linux fades into obscurity. With BSD dying and Apple beleaguered, Minix will become the next major competitor to Windows.
Tanenbaum said it's been released under a BSD-style license. Well, if you believe the quote Ken Brown gives....
If Linus had a good experience with Minix, why would he create Linux?
Wine? More like ReactOS. Wine is basically just a from-scratch rewrite of part of the Windows API, not a complete OS.
It was a really good paper.
no it isn't, because the idea of LFS isn't a couple miliseconds faster response time, it's to learn how the OS works
Back in 2002 or 2003, a Windows admin suggested that I check out a PC operating system called "Windows." Back then, "googling" consisted of pointing a browser at http://www.google.com/ and manually traversing all the porn pages returned looking for something interesting. I don't remember if it was at http://www.google.com/ or http://www.google.de/, or even on http://labs.google.com/, but I eventually stumbled across this PC Windows clone called "Lindows." It sounded right, so I went with it.
Months later, I spoke to the admin again, and found that I was mistaken. Rather than downling thousands of MegaBytes of files for an unreliable operating system, I had a fairly functional Linux workstation which ran Windows programs, ethernet and all the rest of the good stuff that Linux users take for granted today like reliability and security but are PC fantasies for Windows XP users.
We'll have a contest to see how many _single_ developers can design, code and finish
an operating system similar to Minix(conceptually) with some standards compliance(i.e.POSIX.)
We'll select a bunch of the most critical subsystems and define those as a Base and give extra
points for the following:
- using a language that's not generally used for OS design,
- designing and coding for portability(more platforms=more points)
- smallest code base
- best documentation
- time to complete, less time=more points
- fastest(benchmarkers paradise here we come...)
- POSIX compliance, more compliant=more points
- massive extra points for running windows software ;-)
- 'clean', no borrowed code = +100 points
and i'm sure there are other categories.
So for example, person A get 100 points for base compliance, 25 points for using a language
not generally used for OS design(Visual Basic?) another 25 points for best documentation.
His total score would be 150.
Person B submits a Base+ OS:
base compliance = 100
written in Forth = 25
highly portable = 25
time to complete, 6months, 23 days, = 25 points
best documentation = 25 points total score, 200 points
Ultimately, the point is how many POSIX-subset compliant OS's written by ONE programmer/analyst
can we get and how long will it take?
Say we get about twenty-five(25) base-implementations submitted by six months, three(3)
decent base+ implementations in 9-10 months and one(1) truly great implementation in 13 months;
We can then say that Ken Brown and company really, really don't have a clue about software
development, and OSs in particular.
"...that's as white as it gets; all the bits are on..."
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Package management is for sissies!
(just kidding)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
When I left Microsoft it wasn't pre-emptive or very useful. WTF would I want to look at the code, or play with DOS for?
;-]
In my operating systems class I was learning how to implement stuff that Windows wouldn't have for another three years (yes, I implemented pre-emptive multi-tasking in '92 on x86 hardware, and it wasn't bloody well rocket science).
Hell, I was reading Tanenbaum for my Operating Systems course. I used his definitions for a bunch of system calls to implement a UNIX layer in another OS. (Uh oh, now SCO will sue me and my professor. =)
Quite frankly I think implementing Minix from scratch is a hell of a lot more interesting than anything DOS ever did. [ And I have the course notes to prove it
Now, don't get me wrong, BBS Sysop has street cred in my book, but DOS isn't exactly what I'd call a sophisticated system to want to play with that much as compared to a real multi-tasking OS, which Minix most definitely was.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If fact, back in 1991 I was toying around with both Minix and Linux. Minix was pretty cool but it did cost money and it was pretty basic in what it could do. It was pretty much text only. Linux, on the otherhand was something of a baby huey, born on the gigantic side. I remember ftp'ing disk images for days on my 2400 baud modem and then creating a humongous pile of disks.
Minix, on the other hand, was like 2 disks AFAIK, but it wasn't nearly as groovy as Linux was with all that GNU software that was immediately ported over to run on it. I even struggled to get X running on my Debian 0.9 system but never pulled it off with my EGA card that weighed about ten pounds and was covered with hundreds of chips. A VGA card and monitor cost a king's ransom back in those days was way out of my price range.
But compared to MS-DOS and DesqView, which I used to run my old BBS system on back then, Linux was pretty darned cool! You could put a getty on your comport and it kind of was a bbs already, and you could actually do meaningfull things with your computer while it ran the bbs since it had virtual consoles and awesome multitasking even back then, whereas with DesqView you sort of had a poorly performing kind of multitasking system that barely ran anything usefull without taking up so many cycles that nothing really worked well at all. I don't think that Minix was able to do anything like this back then, but then I only really messed around with it for a couple of days.
Clickety Click
Controversy? I cant see one, all I can see is that Brown said a lot of BS and was rebutted by Tanenbaum. My 2 cents.
It seems like a lot of people are missing the point here. Minix is a great way to learn about how operating systems work. A Minix From Scratch project will make it even more useful for this. This will hopefully be a great education tool for people wanting to get into how oeprating systems work. I really don't see it meaning to be a big competitor with GNU/Linux or *BSD
I wonder if Brown can be sued if he lies outright and has no way to prove his claims? The book he writes is not a fiction...
...United States Patent and Trademark Office, an internationally respected agency...
PS My favourite part of Brown's response is:
In my operating systems class I was learning how to implement stuff that Windows wouldn't have for another three years (yes, I implemented pre-emptive multi-tasking in '92 on x86 hardware, and it wasn't bloody well rocket science).
I MER_INTERRUPT, scheduler); /* idle */
Heartsurgery is easy: All you need is a blunt knife. Doing something useful like saving someones life by laying a bypass is not.
Implementing preemptive Multitasking is easy. All you need is a loudmouthed CS student. Doing something useful with it like making a formerly cooperatively multitasking OS preemptive is not. (just think of all the device drivers, filesystem, network code that need to be changed).
It is not a matter of:
#define S_WAITING 1
#define S_READY 2
#define MAXPROC 4
struct task {
int state;
unsigned char cpustate[SCPUSTATE];
}
struct task tasktable[MAXPROC];
int currentproc = 0;
disable_interrupts();
set_interrupt_vector(T
program_timer();
init_task(0, NULL);
init_task(1, task1);
init_task(2, task2);
enable_interrupts();
while(1) {
serout ("Idle hands read slashdot");
}
find_eligible_task() {
while(currentproc < maxproc && tasktable[currentproc].state != S_READY)
currentproc++;
if (currentproc == maxprc)
currentproc = 0;
}
scheduler() {
save_current_cpustate(tasktable);
find_eligible_task();
restore_cpustate[currentproc];
}
task1() {
while (1)
serout ("He mom! Check it out! I did this!\n");
}
task2() {
while(1)
serout ("You mean I can't use the UART when you are using it?\n");
}
There. Preemptive multitasking more or less. Build your own toy operating system around it. Filling in the assembly code for stuff like
dis/enable_interrupts, init_task, save/restore cpu_state etc. I will leave it to the inclined CS student to do that.
I think choosing Minix over Hurd has everything to do with Minix being a working kernel that has been ported to a number of architectures, whereas the Hurd is struggling to work on even one architecture.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
MFS - Minix from Scratch
This project is not intended to replace or compete with ANY existing operating system. It is not an installation FAQ. It is not a DISTRO.
It is an attempt to make OS design and system internals accessible to the masses in a way that Linux cannot - due in part to its sheer mass and in part to its complexity (what makes it useful as a desktop and enterprise server). Minix provides us with a platform that is well designed, modular and well documented in source code, in addition to being a compact code base from which to spring from.
The project is in its infancy. A lot of folks have been complaining, here at /., that the project is lacking in output - give us a break, we are less than a month old. We are dependant on collaboration, if you think that there isn't much done yet - do it and you'll be very appreciated - otherwise, watch and learn, we'll get there in time.
To the many folks who have expressed interest in our little project - thanks, I look forward to working with you.
Will