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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."
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?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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"
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.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
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.