Minix 3.2 Released, Uses LLVM/Clang, SMP, ELF

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Minix 3.2 Released, Uses LLVM/Clang, SMP, ELF

Minix, the open-source operating system built around a unique micro-kernel design that pre-dates Linux, is up to version 3.2 with many changes...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTA2Mzc

[uid313]

License regrets?

I wonder if this guy ever regrets not releasing MINIX as open source before Linux?

MINIX existed before Linux but was closed source. Then came Linux which was open source and it became big and famous.
If MINIX had been open source from the start, then Linux would have never been written and Andrew S. Tanenbaum could be the rockstar that Linus Torvalds is today.

[RealNC]

I wonder if this guy ever regrets not releasing MINIX as open source before Linux?

Because he was selling it 200 bucks a copy.

MINIX existed before Linux but was closed source. Then came Linux which was open source and it became big and famous.
If MINIX had been open source from the start, then Linux would have never been written and Andrew S. Tanenbaum could be the rockstar that Linus Torvalds is today.

Tanenbaum was already famous. A respected and very well known scientist. I'd take respected scientist over rockstar any day.

[Ex-Cyber]

It's not just that he (or rather his publisher, IIRC) was selling MINIX, it's that he wanted it to remain a research/education-focused system. I don't know where the quote is (probably somewhere in the "Linux is obsolete" thread), but ISTR Tanenbaum saying that he was actually glad that Linux provided an outlet for hackers who wanted to build a "real" system with lots of useful-but-theoretically-boring features, because it meant that people might stop trying to get him to add a bunch of things to MINIX.

[ciplogic]

Should we see benchmarks? As Minix was (and I think still is) a bit limited, the main differences are in:
- disk drivers/file system
- threading (as there is more message passing between processes/threads)
So probably just the disk/computationally intensive computations, may be interesting. Apache server, I think not so much. If it does support hardware instructions for (de)crypt I think still is not so interesting (as for me).
At the end, maybe Java benchmarks may be skipped (if it runs Java from Oracle), but I think it would fare fairly bad.
Ah, and is better if is done in a dual-core (at least CPU) to be visible if it does see the extra core.

[uid313]

Phoronix Test Suite

Does Phoronix Test Suite support MINIX?

Go go Michael, add support for MINIX in PTS and Phodevi, then make some benchmarks!

[jannis]

I just saw Andrew today at embedded world trade fair in nuremberg. He had his own "MINIX3" both there. As he was really busy hacking stuff into his laptop I rather left him alone

[kraftman]

Should we see benchmarks?

Here:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/2/26/69

That being said, maybe you'd be happier engaging with the Minix 3
community. They are folks who think (unproven, theoretical) safety is
more important than performance. And they've created a kernel which
is a 140 times slower at process creation, ten times greater syscall
overhead, and file copies that were two to ten times slower.[1]

[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/220255/

Tanenbaum, go home with that crap.

[ArchLinux]

There's nothing interesting or even worthwhile in Minix. Same as Hurd. Or even stuff like CVS.

Being open source doesn't make you any better per se.

[Ibidem]

There's nothing interesting or even worthwhile in Minix. Same as Hurd. Or even stuff like CVS.

Being open source doesn't make you any better per se.

Ironic you mention CVS: minix just switched to git.

Besides that, what can you expect of a project associated with the FSF?
/ducks

kraftman might have the reason that the answer to the filesystem in userspace proposal was a prompt NO.


Overall, it looks like they ported the Minix-3 kernel to NetBSD!