Thread: Minix 3
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Old 12th September 2017
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rons rons is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ip6ix View Post
Interesting to see Minix still around. I remember running an early version of it around the beginning of the 1990's. At the time the only way to obtain a current copy was to write to the author, Andy Tanenbaum, who taught the OS as part of his course on operating systems. Minix also formed a core part of his book, "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation" (which had a minimal version of minix included on cd).

ISTR at the time it was the only way to run a UNIX-like OS on the cheap. A couple of years later Linux became available and everything changed.
It's a great concept (the microkernel). I have Andy's book, which has an early copy of Minix in the cover CD sleeve. I've run Minix3 on an x86, but the network driver for my particular NIC seems to give a fairly low thruput (usable, but definitely not high performance), and so I tend not to use it for regular computing. But, it's fun to play with the microkernel, and watch the drivers reload on their own when they crash (without taking the system down). I guess that's the idea.

Anyway, what would interest me more is to see Minix3 ported to the Raspberry, since there's fewer options in that arena. I see some upstart work on it here:

https://github.com/boricj

Also, there was a gsoc suggestion:

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/minix3/eQXMhscIPmQ

Last edited by rons; 12th September 2017 at 04:48 PM.
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