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Minix development has been abandoned?

git.minix3.org

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Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#91

Post by em500 »

mr_toad wrote: post #53
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 was the introduction of paged memory management and a flat address space that allowed Unix like OSs to run on the 386.

Xenix was an officially licensed Unix for the 16-bit 8086.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix

Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#92

Post by paride5745 »

programmer_dude wrote: post #90
withinboredom wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, full OS with its own microkernel and NetBSD-forked userland.

Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#93

Post by withinboredom »

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.

I'd be really curious why there are downvotes, mostly for the discussion.

Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#94

Post by flir »

chasil wrote: post #56
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…

Microsoft Xenix also supported the 286. The Korn shell's source code was an ugly mess in an effort to fit the text segment in the 64k address space on this platform. The POSIX shell removed many Korn shell features to reach clear and maintainable code with the same size limits. I'm able to compile Debian dash to a bit over 80k on 32-bit Linux without much effort. I've heard that it's 4x faster and 10x smaller than ba…

I learned C under Xenix. One machine and a pile of dumb terminals. I wrote a program to solve the travelling salesman problem via GA. Good times.

Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#96

Post by KptMarchewa »

paride5745 wrote: post #92
programmer_dude wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Minix 3 is an OS?

Yes, full OS with its own microkernel and NetBSD-forked userland.

What's the point of nitpicking userland if we're concerned with processor build-in management engines?

Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#97

Post by p_l »

mr_toad wrote: post #53
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 was the introduction of paged memory management and a flat address space that allowed Unix like OSs to run on the 386.

Unix didn't require paged address space, and several were running using 286 segmentation only (some even without that, but that was pretty much without any protections, while 286 gave equivalent memory management to late PDP-11)

Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#99

Post by skissane »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #65
js2 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

x86 has hardware support for context switching, which is basically saving all the registers and jumping to a new address. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Task_state_segment

does x86_64 use this?

x86-64 still requires Task State Segments (TSS), but it doesn't support using them for their original primary purpose of task switching; rather, they are needed for changing stacks when switching between user and kernel mode.

In the original 386 design, the OS kernel would create a separate TSS for each OS process. In x86-64's vestigial use of the concept, there is a single TSS for each CPU, and every process running on that CPU shares the same TSS.

Re: Minix development has been abandoned?

#100

Post by tivert »

RealStickman_ wrote: post #79
tivert wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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

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

Thoughtfully engaging with policy isn't a waste of time, but that not what the website in question was doing. It looked like it was all poll numbers and horse-race analysis, that's the stuff we should leave for the hacks.

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