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Andrew S. Tanenbaum Receives ACM Software System Award

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Re: Andrew S. Tanenbaum Receives ACM Software System Award

#31

Post by GTP »

LeFantome wrote: post #25
GTP wrote: post #21

It's funny to see how they highlight that it inspired Linux, ehile Tanenbaum heavily criticized it for not being a microkernel :D

Well, it “inspired” Linux because Linus was unhappy with Minix. Linus wanted UNIX and Minix was not what he was looking for. I don’t think emulating Minix itself was ever his goal. He chose the Minix file system originally but this was just pragmatic as that is what his drive was formatted with. The earliest versions of Linux were written on Minix though. Credit where credit is due. Interestingly, Linus was unaware o…

IIRC the very first installations of Linix started with Minix as a base, that then was "patched" into Linux. So it was more than just the filesystem. But yes, Torvalds wasn't happy with Minix, and Tanenbaum wasn't happy with Linux.

Re: Andrew S. Tanenbaum Receives ACM Software System Award

#32

Post by boricj »

latenightcoding wrote: post #23

is MINIX abandonware now? Many years ago I tried to install the release that works (or comes bundled) with a light window manager but it was not trivial and it looked pretty abandoned even back then.

MINIX3's development has stalled years ago.

Basically, around MINIX 3.2.0 (just before I stated contributing) the OS ditched its homegrown userland and adopted the NetBSD source tree + pkgsrc. While that boosted the software compatibility of MINIX3 in the short term, the maintenance burden of keeping up with upstream with such a large diff proved unsustainable in the long term, especially after the grant money dried up.

In hindsight, my opinion is that MINIX3 should've gone with NetBSD binary compatibility. The NetBSD syscall table would've been a far slower moving target to keep up with than the entire NetBSD source tree.

The OS also had a significant amount of tech debt, especially in the microkernel which was uniprocessor and 32-bit only, as well as outdated hardware support which meant nobody was daily-driving it anymore. It also was an aging design: while the system was divided up into user-mode servers with message-based communication, you couldn't containerize a process by spawning a parallel userland ecosystem for example because it wasn't capability-based or namespaceable.

It's too bad really, because the base system had really impressive capabilities. It could transparently survive crashes of stateless drivers, even when stress-testing it by injecting faults into the drivers at runtime. You could live-update the various system services at runtime without losing state or impacting clients. Some really good papers came out of MINIX3 [1].

I've ranted more in detail before, both on HN [2] as well on Google Groups [3]. I do not fault the maintainers for the current state of affairs because keeping up the MINIX3 userland against modern software standards was a major maintenance burden, so adopting NetBSD's one way or another was inevitable. At any rate, there are other micro-kernel based operating systems [4], some under active development, so MINIX's spirit lives on.

[1] https://wiki.minix3.org/doku.php?id=publications

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34916261

[3] https://groups.google.com/g/minix3/c/qUdPZ0ansVw/m/7LuOv0YOA...

[4] http://www.microkernel.info/

Re: Andrew S. Tanenbaum Receives ACM Software System Award

#33

Post by LeFantome »

latenightcoding wrote: post #23

is MINIX abandonware now? Many years ago I tried to install the release that works (or comes bundled) with a light window manager but it was not trivial and it looked pretty abandoned even back then.

Not even a commit in years. Yes, I would say it is dead.

Re: Andrew S. Tanenbaum Receives ACM Software System Award

#36

Post by globular-toast »

alex_suzuki wrote: post #15

His book “Computer Networks” was one of my favourites in my CompSci study days. Many years later I gave lectures on Distributed Systems at a business school and based the material on the book. Still feels relevant, even today.

This was my favourite textbook of my entire undergrad CS studies. I still have it on my shelf to this day. I've never gone deep into networking but the broad knowledge has stayed with me and comes in useful again and again. I would say it sets me apart from many other engineers.

Re: Andrew S. Tanenbaum Receives ACM Software System Award

#37

Post by fooker »

ginko wrote: post #29

It's kind of sad systems research pretty much stopped at this point. I really was hoping that by 2024 I'd be running a distributed operating system where processes could be be freely migrated between my phone, desktop, laptop and NAS without too much of a hitch.

The research has not stalled at all, the incentive to make consumer devices has because of the capture by tech giants. If someone wanted to implement an interesting idea like this, they would be harshly judged for not being able to compete with pixels and iphones for the rest of the stack. See Rabbit for example.

What you are describing is the bread and butter of modern systems research and all the large cloud providers internally implement this kind of thing.

Re: Andrew S. Tanenbaum Receives ACM Software System Award

#38

Post by Rochus »

looperhacks wrote: post #13
Rochus wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did they use Minix and not e.g. L4 or sel4? Which version of Minix did they actually use? There is Minix v3.1 (released in 2005 with the book), 3.2 (released in 2012) and 3.3 (released in 2014).

The original L4 (I believe) wasn't commercially available und sel4 is GPL licensed. Minix has a BSD license, so maybe that's why

The original L4 was written in assembler and replaced by different other implementations long before the ME platform was developed. Pistachio was in development around that time and available under BSD.

Re: Andrew S. Tanenbaum Receives ACM Software System Award

#39

Post by santiagobasulto »

I’ll never forget this. I was listening to a talk by Reed Hastings (Netflix Founder/CEO) at (I think was) Stanford. He was explaining how he came up with the idea of Netflix. A student asked: “when did you realize you had to switch to the internet”. At which he replied: “that was the idea from the beginning. We knew networks were going to become what they are today. Look, there’s a saying in a CS textbook that says: ‘never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of tapes over the interstate’. We knew we had to ship the DVDs first until at some point the network would reach our desired level”.

While I was watching that i said: “DUDE! I remember that quote (and that illustration)”. Went to my text book and there it was. In Tanenbaum’s networking textbook.

Aside from the anecdote, this guy has had a huge influence in the whole industry (not even mentioning the Kernel debates).

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