[HN Gopher] Minix 3 (2014)
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Minix 3 (2014)
Author : droideqa
Score : 86 points
Date : 2024-09-27 15:29 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.minix3.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.minix3.org)
| teddyh wrote:
| Now mostly used in the Intel Management Engine.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Does anyone know why Intel would pick Minix? I can understand
| not picking Linux, from a licencing perspective, but surely
| some BSD would have been easier to hire for and more likely to
| have a modern upstream.
| teddyh wrote:
| Intel may have needed some of Minix' unique (for the time)
| features, like its microkernel architecture and seamless live
| updates of system components.
| Rochus wrote:
| Actually I would be interested to see an official
| confirmation by Intel that they indeed still use Minix, and
| which version of it. So far all such claims I'm aware of came
| from third parties.
| henning wrote:
| Dead project?
| marcodiego wrote:
| Yes.
| boricj wrote:
| Deader than disco. I seem to reiterate the technical reasons
| every couple of months or so [1], therefore this time I'll talk
| more about the management of the project, although I was not a
| member of the core team so it's mostly observation from the
| outside in.
|
| Historically, the operating system was largely used as a
| research platform for writing papers and theses [2].
| Unfortunately, research code isn't production-grade code, so
| despite a lot of effort done to mainline some of it, not all of
| it was merged. Also, while there was a steady supply of new
| students to work on MINIX3, there was also a steady turnover
| because students who finish their studies generally move on to
| new things.
|
| With the looming retirement of Andrew Tanenbaum in 2014, the
| project pivoted focus to embedded systems, due to the technical
| strengths and weaknesses of the system at that time. The ARM
| port was done around that time as part of it to leverage small
| board computers. Eventually, the funding dried up and the
| project slowed to a standstill, largely I believe due to an
| unsustainable maintenance burden caused by accumulated tech
| debt over decades that the remaining development manpower (all
| contributors working on their free time, including myself)
| couldn't address.
|
| MINIX3 still has some unique cool stuff to this day like
| seamless live updates of system components, but for me it's too
| shackled by its past to have a future. It'd be a lot of work to
| bring it up to modern standards and personally by the time I'd
| be done with that I think ought to be done, it wouldn't look
| like MINIX anymore.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40762110
|
| [2] https://wiki.minix3.org/doku.php?id=publications
| chipdart wrote:
| > Deader than disco.
|
| The real question is whether the project is deader than HURD.
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| easy win, HURD was never alive in the first place to be
| dead
| boricj wrote:
| Given that HURD has a steady trickle of commits and an
| ongoing quarterly status update on their website, it's more
| alive than MINIX3 currently is.
| my123 wrote:
| Harder to say in practice than that, because Minix 3 has
| production deployments on the Intel (CS)ME, across
| hundreds of millions of machines, something that the Hurd
| never had
| boricj wrote:
| Tanenbaum published an open letter about this [1]. The
| gist of it is that Intel took MINIX3 to create the Intel
| Management Engine, but never contributed anything back.
| This was permitted by the BSD license, but all these
| deployments didn't actually help MINIX3 itself grow as a
| project.
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20240920163544/https://ww
| w.cs.vu...
| Rochus wrote:
| > because Minix 3 has production deployments on the Intel
| (CS)ME
|
| Is there actually an official Intel document which
| confirms this? So far I only saw claims by third parties.
| Do we know which version of Minix was used, and which
| parts of it?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I'm sure the emergence of other open-source operating systems
| (Linux and BSD) also contributed to the drop in interest?
|
| If you were teaching an OS class in the late 1980s/early
| 1990s and wanted to have students work on and compile the
| source code of a UNIX-like system, using desktop PCs of the
| era, Minix was pretty much it wasn't it?
| boricj wrote:
| > I'm sure the emergence of other open-source operating
| systems (Linux and BSD) also contributed to the drop in
| interest?
|
| At that time, MINIX had a proprietary license (it wasn't
| open-source until 2000) and its stated purpose was being a
| teaching tool for education, not being a production
| operating system. I can't find the quote itself, but I
| recall Tanenbaum once said something along the lines of
| "Turns out I do want to turn MINIX3 into a product, it just
| took me thirty years to realize it!" (please don't quote me
| on that unless I manage to dig up the actual quote).
|
| > If you were teaching an OS class in the late 1980s/early
| 1990s and wanted to have students work on and compile the
| source code of a UNIX-like system, using desktop PCs of the
| era, Minix was pretty much it wasn't it?
|
| Nowadays, xv6 fills that niche. Recent versions of MINIX3
| arguably outgrew that with the switch over to the NetBSD
| userland.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > At that time, MINIX had a proprietary license
|
| Thanks, I didn't remember that but now that you say it
| that sounds right. Still, I think it was one of the few
| ways students at the time could inspect the code of a
| complete OS, modify it, recompile it, and run their
| changes, all on the PC that many of them had at home or
| in classrooms.
| GianFabien wrote:
| Minix was the foundations upon which Linus built his early
| versions of Linux.
| GianFabien wrote:
| For me Minix became bloated when they transitioned to
| supporting BSD userland and X11.
|
| The considerable bloat detracted from the principle of using
| Minix to teach OS principles.
| linsomniac wrote:
| "News" page last update: March 2016. Maybe need a "(2014)" on the
| title, looks like that was when 3.3.0 was released.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, added. Thanks!
| lacoolj wrote:
| not sure what makes this "news" but it did give me some nostalgia
| in the "Getting Started" page:
|
| > Now you are ready to start the installation procedure. When
| installing to the bare computer, put the CD-ROM in the drive,
| close the door and shut the computer down.
| jmorenoamor wrote:
| I remember having to implement partial file locking in Minix as
| an assignment in college. Good times,
| jschulenklopper wrote:
| Same here. I adapted the file system to honor user quota, and
| changed the kernel to support priority process scheduling. We
| also needed to implemented a change in the memory management
| part... that ironically I cannot remember anymore.
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _Minix development has been abandoned?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36064961 - May 2023 (109
| comments)
|
| _Ask HN: Is Minix dead? No commits since 2018_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26451540 - March 2021 (142
| comments)
|
| _Minix 3.3.0_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8324578 -
| Sept 2014 (172 comments)
|
| _Minix 3.2.1 Released_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5272980 - Feb 2013 (24
| comments)
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