I'm glad people are talking about this. Minix has so much potential, and it needs a community. It also has a very specific area of need, it's not like you would install it on a desktop and I doubt you can get it running with a purpose in AWS.
Minix development has been abandoned?
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Re: Minix development has been abandoned?
#32I always saw Minix3 was as a companion to the "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation 3/e by Andrew S" book which was in 2006. Probably you were only ever going to run it in a virtual machine. More of an "educational" kernel.
Not gonna go hunt for the link right now, but I think Minix 3 was intended to be more industrially applicable than it's predecessors: there's a talk somewhere where Tanenbaum talked about the need for a more fault tolerant kernel in all sorts of applications, and I think he got a grant from some European institution for that purpose.
Re: Minix development has been abandoned?
#33I'm glad this is getting brought up. Minix has so much potential and it is due for an open source community to care with a mission. Its hard to find where an org would use it since Linux is so popular and so few orgs really need a hyper reliable operating system with limited libraries and dependencies. Military or space problems?
Re: Minix development has been abandoned?
#34Can’t software be done? No known bugs, all features in a proposed scope written. Done and done.
> No known bugs
This is the part that I doubt will ever be achieved by any system or structure of moderate complexity or above. Everything that exists in the real world has problems with it. If it's a building or a machine, then it's done once it's built unless there are major safety issues. The cost of fixing non-critical issues in a physical product is too high to justify.
The problem with software is that the marginal cost of "one more fix" is close to zero, which means that declaring something "done" means drawing a somewhat arbitrary line in the sand. Why is this new complaint less important than the similarly-scoped one that you fixed last week? There's not really a good answer to this question, so there's never a good day to say that you're not fixing anything more.
Re: Minix development has been abandoned?
#35The reason is probably that enthusiasm died out when Intel used it for their covert management engine in every x86 cpu they sell. Essentially bavkdooring all computers in the world...
Should've used GPL...
Then no one would be using it at all and Intel would pick the next OS project to use.
Re: Minix development has been abandoned?
#36Can’t software be done? No known bugs, all features in a proposed scope written. Done and done.
Nothing is ever done. Even things as established as the bicycle and cooking are under constant evolution, research, and improvement. Software is hardly getting started in comparison.
Re: Minix development has been abandoned?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Um wat
Probably refers to [1] 1 - https://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-removing-minix-mana...
This site breaks the back button on mobile. It inserts a page to the stack, and it seems under certain conditions that page breaks the link back to this thread. It happened to me after reading the entire article, but not when I tried without reading the article.
Re: Minix development has been abandoned?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should've used GPL...
Then no one would be using it at all and Intel would pick the next OS project to use.
That is what enterprises said about Linux.
But the network effects are too strong and the GPL requiring the source code for drivers to be released increases the network effects. Unlike permissive licenses.
Busybox is still overwhelmed suing companies repeatably ignoring the GPL.
Re: Minix development has been abandoned?
#39Technically intel is keeping it alive. Just not feeding back code.
It's sad though. Minix was the first ever Unix I played with! Because Linux only worked on the 386 (it required 386 specific features like task switching) and I still had a 286 at the time. Minix worked fine on that.
But it was mainly good for academic purposes (as it's intended to). I never really ran it as an OS. It was hard to find software and it didn't come with a lot of programs, unlike linux distros which came with a huge collection as they still do today.
On a 286 it was really cool to have an actual multitasking OS though because DOS was still the main thing back then.
Re: Minix development has been abandoned?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then no one would be using it at all and Intel would pick the next OS project to use.
That is what enterprises said about Linux. But the network effects are too strong and the GPL requiring the source code for drivers to be released increases the network effects. Unlike permissive licenses. Busybox is still overwhelmed suing companies repeatably ignoring the GPL.
That's a different usecase. Linux is good for general computing. Intel specifically wanted something they could close down as much as possible.