Minix 3.2.1 Released

kthreadd writes "Minix, originally designed as an example for teaching operating system theory which was both inspiration and cause for the creation of Linux has just been released as version 3.2.1. Major new features include full support for shared libraries and improved support for USB devices such as keyboards, mice and mass storage devices. The system has received many performance improvements and several userland tools have been imported from NetBSD."

Comments

Minix+Laptop

[Chompjil]

Verry, nice, may look forward into it for my old laptop from 2007 I won in a raffle

Re:Minix+Laptop

[fahrbot-bot]

yeah... just now getting shared lib support? Am I supposed to be impressed, surprised, amused, perhaps scholastically challenged on a theoretical level...?

Don't be a dick. I first used Minix back in the late 1980s, when it first came out, on an IBM PC/AT. It's great for educational purposes, perhaps even better than Linux/BSD. Any continuing progress on something like this is a good thing.

Re:Minix+Laptop

[Darinbob]

Shared libraries aren't easy to implement and they're not a part of the kernel (Minix is about the kernel). Adding shared libraries adds a lot of complexity and infrastructure. The executables in Minix were kept simple on purpose. Minix resembles a more classic Unix style in many ways.

Pragmatically, it was not feasible to have shared libraries when Minix was new, most Unix systems of the time were still experimenting with it, and you need specific tools chain support that just wasn't there. Now why it didn't change over the intervening years is undoubtedly due to the reason that it's just not all that important for the purpose of Minix which is education.

how does it compare to NetBSD as a teaching tool?

[Trepidity]

Afaik, NetBSD and Minix are the two most prominent operating systems that advertise clean source code and architecture, suitable for examination by people learning OS principles, as one of their explicit design goals. NetBSD seems more popular as an actual system to use, and is clean architecture has led it to be famously ported everywhere. Does someone have experience with Minix to compare?

Hardware compatibility

[MichaelSmith]

Looking under "Drivers, FS" it would seem that the Minix developers are still focusing on keeping it compatible with qemu and virtualbox, ie, they don't expect anybody to run it on real hardware and use it for real jobs.

Re:Hardware compatibility

[Raenex]

Looking under "Drivers, FS" it would seem that the Minix developers are still focusing on keeping it compatible with qemu and virtualbox, ie, they don't expect anybody to run it on real hardware and use it for real jobs.

How does support for virtual hardware mean they don't expect people to run it under real hardware too? I don't follow your logic. Not only that, your conclusion is directly contradicted by the Minix website:

"Research Projects

MINIX 3 won a grant from the European Research Council for 2.5 million [euros] to further research in highly reliable operating systems. Due to its modular nature and fault tolerance, it is easy to use it as a basis for operating systems research or for a product."

and more:

"It was only with the third version, MINIX 3, and the third edition of the book, published in 2006, that the emphasis changed from teaching to a serious research and production system, especially for embedded systems. A few of the many differences between MINIX 2 and MINIX 3 are given here.

Going forward, we are making a serious effort to turn MINIX 3 into an industrial-grade system with a focus on the embedded market, especially for those applications that need high reliability and availability."

Re:Hardware compatibility

[tlhIngan]

Looking under "Drivers, FS" it would seem that the Minix developers are still focusing on keeping it compatible with qemu and virtualbox, ie, they don't expect anybody to run it on real hardware and use it for real jobs.

Well, it's a teaching OS, and if you want to teach how to write an OS, it would help to be able to not need another PC to do it on - after all, you'll build it on the host OS (Minix is self-hosting, so it could be that), but you'd rather not replace your obviously-working kernel with your test version and having to maintain a separate PC just to test with gets old, quick. Perhaps if you had automated deployment tools and all that, but it's still a huge pain. Imagine teaching it - you build and have to switch the projector to the test PC.

So it's kinda useful to have it be very compatible with VM software, especially since a student may not have access to another PC at the moment or what not.

And hell, since Minix self-hosts, it'll be doubly annoying to have to reboot your PC to do your OS course homework, then copy it out somehow to your PC to submit your work, then reboot to do your other homework. So another plus for VM support.

Re:Is this a serious OS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia will give you an answer quicker (30 seconds) than Slashdot responses (5 minutes):

"MINIX is a Unix-like computer operating system based on a microkernel architecture created by Andrew S. Tanenbaum for educational purposes"

Re:Is this a serious OS?

[Trepidity]

I don't think they have any expectation people will use it as a desktop or server OS. They do seem to have a goal of making it suitable for use by embedded-system developers.

Re:Is this a serious OS?

[Anonymous Coward]

MINIX has always been first and foremost a teaching OS. What is exciting is that in recent years, the capability seems to have broken through a wall, and the practical usages has started growing quickly. That means it can now be used for both purposes, which makes it even better at its primary purpose.

MINIX is not trying to be Linux. MINIX is trying to be MINIX, and the exciting thing is that it is now succeeding! So it is one of a growing multitude of options in the free and open source community.

Re:how does it compare to NetBSD as a teaching too

[pipeep]

I'm currently in a university course where Minix 3.2.1 is being used to teach OS principles. It's certainly small, and therefore semi-easy to wrap your head around. But I would not agree that its source code is "clean". They have a lot of really old code and suffer from coding guidelines that have changed greatly over time. I've never seen someone mix tabs and spaces so much in a piece of code. And can anyone say "no namespacing"? That said, I don't have much familiarity of the internals of other kernels, but I'm not too impressed by Minix.

Embedded Market

[crow]

I spoke with Andy Tannenbaum when we were at the OSDI conference last October. He said that Minix has a role in the embedded market, especially in places where companies want to avoid the GPL.

It's a large and growing market. Much as I would prefer Linux, I agree that there's plenty of room for Minix in that market.

Minix being ARMed

[unixisc]

Actually, in the release announcement, they clearly mentioned that

There are exciting new developments coming in the near future that aren’t part of this release. For example, the MINIX team has been working hard on MINIX/ARM support, of which significant parts have made it to mainline, yet official ARM support is slated for the near future and is not officially part of this release.

This is a great move on their part, since Minix, w/ its microkernel, is just perfect for embedded systems and aside from routers, those tend to run on ARM based platforms. I recall reading somewhere that they were porting it to the Raspberry Pi, and hopefully, to other ARM platforms as well. In fact, something like Minix is perfect for Raspberry Pi, and once their ARM port is complete, it would be a good kernel on which to base whatever else is needed. In fact, the Raspberry Pi guys would do well to join hands w/ Tannenbaum and offer Minix as the OS of choice w/ Raspberry Pi.

Regarding the stuff about the drivers, it was just the Virtio and VBFS that seemed to be about VMs - others, like Ext2 support were about real filesystems. (I'm guessing that for an OS targeted at embedded applications, things like Ext4, Btrfs, ZFS, Hammer, et al wouldn't be appropriate file systems to use)

Re:how does it compare to NetBSD as a teaching too

[Trepidity]

Ah, the classic Slashdot Troll comment, which will here succeed in getting a bite. :) But it will be a short bite: this is exactly how proprietary software works as well. You will despair if you ever see the internals of any of the major proprietary software packages you use regularly.

Re:Is this a serious OS?

[RedHackTea]

Your main points are about restrictions to companies. As a company, you should be concerned about any license and have a lawyer for it. Even if not explicitly stated, every piece of unique work has a natural copyright anyway. Copyleft wasn't made to help companies, but the people. If a person writes code for a new type of compression algorithm and releases it as BSD, then companies are free to improve upon it without ever giving the improvements back. That means company XYZ can substantially improve it and keep it closed source. They have tons of money and tons of coders underneath them working full-time. Company XYZ makes tons of money from this. Eventually, the F/OSS version can't compete and keep up and eventually dies. And if some coding genius could improve the code by 10 fold, then there's no way unless they work for the company. Any free software that wants to use Company XYZ's improved version have to pay fees. If Company XYZ goes under, then the code is never released. It only appears to advance technology temporarily.

Having said all of this, I'm fine with closed-source code. However, copyleft was made for coders, for guys like me. If you're not a coder, then you won't really understand. It wasn't made for companies, so of course, it restricts them. But, the companies can still use it and improve upon the code, so it only restricts them from using code in their closed-source code and from improving upon it without giving back to the original coders that made it. In fact, they could make a "in-house" version where they don't have to make it open source. It's only when you distribute the code publicly -- when you're profiting from the code -- that you have to release the source code. And if a company is profiting from the work of others, standing on giants' shoulders, shouldn't the guy that they're standing on get some benefit too? Asking for the improvements/fixes in the form of open source code isn't asking for much, seeing as how they wrote the thing in the first place.

Copyleft is for coders and the community of coders. Average Joes like me. It handicaps corporations/companies.