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Minix development has been abandoned?

git.minix3.org

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Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#81

Post by kragen »

Zuider wrote: post #70
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it required 386 specific features like task switching i thought this was a kernel/OS level concept, could you expand more?

It is a kernel/OS level concept (though it was also used in games.) Historically, task-switching had hardware support to some degree even in 8-bit microprocessors such as the Z80, M6809, and 6502 and in 16-bit microprocessors prior to the 386, using interrupts to push all the registers onto a stack, and setting the program counter to start executing instructions at a new address. The vital innovation introduced with…

i agree about task switching; there's nothing 386-specific about longjmp, call/cc, or interrupts, and linux doesn't use the 386 tss (though it did at first: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/26516/wha...)

however, hardware memory protection was an innovation of the early 01960s; it featured prominently in designs like the burroughs 5000 (01961), the ferranti atlas (01962), the cdc 6600 (01964), and the ibm 360 model 67 (01965)

but the 80386 didn't ship until 01985, at which point hardware memory protection had been in off-the-shelf commercial computers for 24 years, very much in serious commercial use; in particular, most of the internet ran on pdp-10s, pdp-11s, vax-11s, and sun workstations, which all had memory protection. it had become universal in mainframes and almost so in minis during the 01970s, and even some micros like the lsi-11 and suns had it

the 286 also had memory protection. what it lacked (like the pdp-11, including the lsi-11) was 32-bit registers. the 386's 32-bit register set meant you didn't have to use segmentation, which was a huge problem for 286 protected mode, and linux mostly doesn't

Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#82

Post by Accujack »

Zuider wrote: post #71
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...

Not even close.

Even if Minix had been installed on every single management card on every computer Intel made from then to now, that number is utterly dwarfed by the number of systems with an installed Linux kernel. That's because in addition to its use as a server and desktop OS, the Linux kernel is the core of the Android distributions that almost every non apple smart phone uses today. Also set top boxes, tablets, watches, and even many smart TVs and Blu Ray players have a copy of Android.

Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#83

Post by Accujack »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #44
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…

> it required 386 specific features like task switching i thought this was a kernel/OS level concept, could you expand more?

The original Linux kernel used the task switching primitives included in the 80386 machine language. The tasks in the OS were directly mapped to 80386 tasks and task table entries, so the kernel was heavily tied to the 386 architecture.

Linus himself once posted to USENet that it was unlikely Linux would ever run on anything but the 386 and its successors. Happily, he did the work to make himself wrong.

Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#84

Post by Accujack »

tomxor wrote: post #68
asperous wrote: post #30

I 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.

> More of an "educational" kernel. If you are writing this on an intel CPU, you are likely running minix3 right now. It's not not educational, but it's not the primary goal compared to earlier versions.

Not necessarily. You can turn off vPro and don't use Intel based network chips, so the management engine is disabled on the hardware level.

Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#85

Post by msla »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #66
msla wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, software can't be done, because the hardware platform it runs on continues to change.

One exciting thing about Moore’s law being finished would be that the hardware stops changing :)

I think you misunderstand Moore's law.

Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#86

Post by withinboredom »

Accujack wrote: post #82
Zuider wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Not even close. Even if Minix had been installed on every single management card on every computer Intel made from then to now, that number is utterly dwarfed by the number of systems with an installed Linux kernel. That's because in addition to its use as a server and desktop OS, the Linux kernel is the core of the Android distributions that almost every non apple smart phone uses today. Also set top boxes, tablets,…

The Linux kernel is a kernel, not an OS. Even if my set-top-box is running some flavor of Android, it looks nothing like my phone or anything else, thus I would classify it as a different OS -- even if the underlying code is based on Android.

Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#87

Post by JdeBP »

chasil wrote: post #67
aidenn0 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check your locale before benchmarking; setting it to "C" negates a lot of the dash performance advantage.

Dunno, the linked article looks like a conclusive performance advantage to me. Bash's own manual page concludes that "it's too big and too slow" in the BUGS section. https://www.baeldung.com/linux/dash-vs-bash-performance

Feel free to go and convince https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35987961, who isn't convinced by the actual measurements that people did. (-:

Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#88

Post by JdeBP »

nonethewiser wrote: post #29
mrelectric wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which one of those is going against OP comment?

All of them

That's pretty poor analysis. The existence of an issues list on GitHub doesn't automatically mean that the issues are valid, and the 2nd random one that I picked was someone complaining that fetching a package with FTP didn't work when the network was down. In 2021.

* https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...

Then this one turned out to be a chat request.

* https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...

And this one the author actually asked to be closed, because the problem is fixed. It's still open.

* https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...

If those are any indication, this is an issues list where no-one gets rid of the rubbish, and it thus its existence alone tells one nothing at all, as one probably is going to have to weed a whole bunch of very clearly non-bugs out to determine if there's anything left.

Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#89

Post by JdeBP »

Bondi_Blue wrote: post #16

There's still chatter in the Google Group and GH Issues, and some GH PRs. https://groups.google.com/g/minix3?pli=1 https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix

The pull requests list is better than the issues list.

This non-bug asks for a video on how to use OpenSSH:

* https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...

This one was fixed in 2017:

* https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...

This non-bug asks for where to start when learning:

* https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...

I've gone through quite a few of these at random, for this and another comment on this page, and this one is the first one that is even close to an outstanding bug, and it's only open because the pull request that fixed the problem back in 2020 hasn't been merged yet.

* https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...

Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#90

Post by programmer_dude »

withinboredom wrote: post #86
Accujack wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even close. Even if Minix had been installed on every single management card on every computer Intel made from then to now, that number is utterly dwarfed by the number of systems with an installed Linux kernel. That's because in addition to its use as a server and desktop OS, the Linux kernel is the core of the Android distributions that almost every non apple smart phone uses today. Also set top boxes, tablets,…

The Linux kernel is a kernel, not an OS. Even if my set-top-box is running some flavor of Android, it looks nothing like my phone or anything else, thus I would classify it as a different OS -- even if the underlying code is based on Android.

And Minix 3 is an OS?
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