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Minix development has been abandoned?

git.minix3.org

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Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#71

Post by Zuider »

wkat4242 wrote: post #39

Technically 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…

Intel uses a specialized version of Minix 3 for its Intel Management Engine in every CPU it released since 2008, so technically, it is the most installed OS.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/hardware/intels-secret...

Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#72

Post by jonhohle »

rodgerd wrote: post #51
jonhohle wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it's a building or a machine, then it's done once it's built… Modern construction requires a significant amount of maintenance. The Romans on the other hand, they knew how to build a building!

> Modern construction requires a significant amount of maintenance. I was raised with the rule of thumb that you should budget 1% of the purchase price of a house for maintenance; while that's roughly true for my century-old villa that I purchased at the turn of the century, I suspect that the hockey-stick of residential housing has made it a bit inaccurate. And something that I didn't really understand until an arch…

Yeah, modern commercial buildings suck compared to many of the old skyscrapers and government buildings built >100 years ago. The Empire State Building, the capitol building, grand central station, etc. Just walking through them you can tell by the materials and craftsmanship that they were built to last.

Modern buildings, on the other hand, feel cheap and their unlimited flexibility leaves them with no inherent character.

Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#73

Post by stephen_g »

blown_gasket wrote: post #42
durandaul_xx wrote: post #33

I'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?

For both military and space applications, I believe that real-time operating systems are employed. Minix is not in the sphere of RTOS.

Yes, and also if it has to be certified for functional safety (as a lot of systems that use those kind of RTOSes have to be) then that really has to be designed into the system from the start. So Minix would probably be a non-starter in that regard too (as is something like Linux)

Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#74

Post by harry8 »

nequo wrote: post #48
wkat4242 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a different usecase. Linux is good for general computing. Intel specifically wanted something they could close down as much as possible.

So if Minix was under GPL, Intel would probably have gone with NetBSD or FreeBSD. Or possibly something different altogether.

L4 is popular among similar corporate trojan malware deployed in secret against customers. Most of its use is by qualcom. Apparently apple are doing something similar.

This large scale deployment is apparently billed by some as the payoff for the promise of microkernels w.r.t. "security" so I guess they just don't mean yours?

Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#75

Post by kqr »

tambourine_man wrote: post #4

Can’t software be done? No known bugs, all features in a proposed scope written. Done and done.

The problem is not fulfilling the requirements -- that can happen. The problem is that requirements change when the rest of the world does.

If remodeling buildings had the ROI that continued development of software does, that would happen all the time too.

Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#76

Post by toast0 »

lolinder wrote: post #34
tambourine_man wrote: post #4

Can’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 marg…

> No known bugs

That's too high a standard. If nothing else, differences of opinion over the design are sometimes classified as bugs. No known bugs worth the effort to fix and deploy is acheivable.

Most NES software is done, none of the bugs are worth recalling to update roms.

Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#77

Post by tivert »

dotnwat wrote: post #45
zellyn wrote: post #5

The primary author and evangelist of Minix is 79 years old, so maybe slowing down a bit? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum

He is one of the folks behind https://www.electoral-vote.com/ which I think must take up a lot of time.

[flagged]

Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#79

Post by RealStickman_ »

tivert wrote: post #77
dotnwat wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is one of the folks behind https://www.electoral-vote.com/ which I think must take up a lot of time.

[flagged]

And the other hand I often hear people complain about out of touch politicians regulating fields where they completely lack any understanding.

Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#80

Post by bombcar »

lolinder wrote: post #34
tambourine_man wrote: post #4

Can’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 marg…

TeX and METAFONT are designed to be "done" when Knuth dies:

> At the time of my death, it is my intention that the then-current versions of TEX and METAFONT be forever left unchanged, except that the final version numbers to be reported in the “banner” lines of the programs should become TeX, Version $\pi$ and METAFONT, Version $e$ respectively. From that moment on, all “bugs” will be permanent “features.”

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