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Europe Funds Secure Operating System Research
narramissic writes "A Dutch university has received a $3.3 million grant from the European Research Council to fund 5 more years of work on a Unix-type operating system, called Minix, that aims to be more reliable and secure than either Linux or Windows. The latest grant will enable the three researchers and two programmers on the project to further their research into a making Minix capable of fixing itself when a bug is detected, said Andrew S. Tanenbaum, a computer science professor at Vrije Universiteit. 'It irritates me to no end when software doesn't work,' Tanenbaum said. 'Having to reboot your computer is just a pain. The question is, can you make a system that actually works very well?'"
said Andrew S. Tanenbaum, a computer science professor at Vrije Universiteit
It sounds intentionally misleading to present them as "a computer science professor" when he's the one MINIX guy.
You just got troll'd!
Software, heal thyself? There's a reason self-modifying code is frowned upon. Besides, is kernel reliability really an issue these days? Even the Windows kernel only really crashes when you feed it bad memory.
They are actually talking about things like driver isolation with monitoring and restarts. The answer to whether kernels are stable enough depends on your requirements. I find that I am much less forgiving when my DVD player crashes and doesn't record the film I have set than when my computer crashes, though both are now very rare events. Monitoring, isolation and restarting is used in things like engine management systems, where failures are even less welcome and a full OS with this level of reliability is bound to have applications in medicine, industry, "defence", etc.
I'd recommend people take a look at the source code for Minix 3. It's actually pretty easy to wrap your head around, even for a C-phobic person like I am.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
That depends on how you've designed things, I guess. "Today's PC hardware" (& yesterdays for that matter) has always provided 4 protection ring levels, but very few OSes have ever made use of more than 2 (1 for the kernel, one for userspace). You could certainly put drivers in a higher ring than the kernel and allow them to only have limited access to memory, just as you do with a user-space application.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
...is to call this news. The grant was received in November 2008! (see http://www.minix3.org/news/)
From www.minix3.org "MINIX 1 and 2 were intended as teaching tools; MINIX 3 adds the new goal of being usable as a serious system on resource-limited and embedded computers and for applications requiring high reliability"
I remember Minix. Before there was Linux, Minix was around. It was my first exposure to a Unix-like operating system on a PC. It was surprisingly lean and elegant and Unix-like. I still have the box of floppies. I remember recompiling and modifying the operating system. It was indeed quite a powerful tool, and I dare say an important precursor to Linux.
(When I first heard about Linux, I had incorrectly assumed it was an evolution of Linux.)
I see a lot of people bashing Minix here; I don't think it will replace Linux by any means, but it is an important historical OS, IMHO.
Wiki notes (about Linux):
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
It's also a research OS - the aim isn't to make minix the next best thing, the aim is to research self-healing OS software by using minix as a test platform.
Most good production software takes a good look at similar software to imitate the best features of each - this isn't a competition between minix and linux, it's testing a feature is a simpler (and thus cheaper) fashion.
The aim is not to produce a better operating system, the aim is to secure funding. This is what academics actually do; good research is (at best) a byproduct. This is business as usual for a research group.
Not really. The purpose is doing the research you are interested in doing (even if it's just for your career ambitions). For that you need funding. So of course you have to do some marketing to sell the research you want to do to the people deciding whom to fund. You think this guy has been doing MINIX for 20 years just to get funding? It's the other way around, you get funding, to be independent and have people work for you so you can get some interesting stuff done. Or, if you are more cynical, he's working on MINIX because it generated enough interest that he could get a ton of publications out of it.
The real research will be a low priority, because the group will need to satisfy the EU bureaucracy that they are doing something worthwhile. Consequently, most of their time will be spent writing reports.
From my experience this is a bit of an exaggeration. It's true that EU-funded projects have more strings attached than those from many other funding sources, but running the burocracy/reports/financials for an EU project that is funding 3 full time people at our university still only takes a rather small percentage of my time.
And that's a lot more freedom to do real research than in any company environment i've seen or heard of so far. Big companies (even the good ones) have IMHO more bureaucracy, not less, and short-term horizon (want returns in 3, 5 years at the most), which means very little of what is called "research and development" has anything to do with research.
Try OpenVMS, a considerably more secure operating system than any Unix variant.
OpenBSD is relatively bug free, but that only makes it superficially more secure than more popular, usable, operating systems. As a basic example, virtually every application not audited by the OpenBSD team themselves opens a potential attack vector. That's true of most operating systems. But VMS at least had the advantage of a locked down privilege system that made it much harder for a hole in an application to create a space where user files, let alone system files, were suddenly attackable.
And, yeah, I'm aware you mentioned the possibility of running OpenVMS on the desktop. DEC made a few "desktop" VAXes and Alphas in their time, and DECWindows was the user interface.
I asked Tanenbaum this question at a lecture he gave on Minix 3 earlier this year. He responded that he changed his mind somewhat about the education-only issue because he felt that, to prove a point about the superiority of the microkernel design, you need to get it out of the lab and into the real world. He also felt that he could do this without hurting the simplicity of the system as a teaching tool. Incidentally, his intention is not to compete with Linux or Windows on the desktop, but rather to make a robust OS for embedded applications.
Andy said at LCA2007 it was a 30% hit, I don't see a 30% performance hit being 'slightly' slower.
I always wondered where this setting was...
The whole idea is utterly futile, except possibly if the code or the concepts can be reused with another system later on.
That is exactly the point of academic research. Toy systems that introduce new concepts are rarely used widely, but the concepts are borrowed for use in other systems later on.