MINIX 3.2.0 Released -- Now With More NetBSD Than Ever
Linked by David Adams on Thu 1st Mar 2012 22:39 UTC, submitted by Andy Kosela
OSNews, Generic OSes MINIX 3.2.0 stable is released. Major features include: Asynchronous, multithreaded virtual file system (VFS) server, Better reliability, Better virtualization support, and much more.
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jayrulez
Member since:
2011-10-17

Minix was not always free(as in speech).
Minix was initially just a research operating system. It's just since recent times that Andrew let known his ambitions for minix.

Too often I see Torvalds' minions spreading FUD about minix, general misconceptions etc...

Would u suggest that minix use inferior SCM tool just to avoid this perceiced irony? Avoid every and anything related to linux or its creator?
That would be cazy :/.
There is no irony in Andrew's team using git. Andrew has never publicly disagreed with anything git or related to git.

Was Andrew right or not?

You decide. Linux is widely used though a failure on the desktop. Linux is a huge piece of software, which is difficult to learn and maintain. Many distributions are unstable. Right now I'm using ubuntu which is forcing me to choose between having children in the future and resting my laptop on my lap because it goes well over 80 degrees C whenever I play any media or connect to my desktop over vnc. Sometimes I try to play a mp3 and for some reason the os hangs, then dies. If a microkernel like minix will offer me greater stability than this, then I welcome it.

The linux of yore was nothing like the linux of today. Linux has had to evolve to stay relevant. It will have to continue to evolve. So will minix.
Success for linux doesn't mean failure for minix or vice versa.

In the near future, minix will not be directly comparable to linux because linux is just a kernel while minix(3) is a full operating system.

Reply Parent Score: 3

tidux Member since:
2011-08-13

Why would you put your laptop directly over your nutsack? Do you have tiny legs or something?

Reply Parent Score: 3

jayrulez Member since:
2011-10-17

No sir. Please excuse the euphemism.

Reply Parent Score: 1

lucas_maximus Member since:
2009-08-18

he just has a massive nutsack.

Reply Parent Score: 2

4nntt Member since:
2009-02-12

I don't think anyone is suggesting that Minix shouldn't be using GIT, just that as it grows larger its utilization of tools that were born out of necessity to support Linux, who's popularity the author of Minix severely underestimated, is somewhat ironic.

Reply Parent Score: 1

zima Member since:
2005-07-06

Linux was born, and grows, by utilization (and kinda stealing the credits) of tools that were born out of necessity to support GNU, a microkernel operating system, oh the irony!!!11111

Reply Parent Score: 2

tuma324 Member since:
2010-04-09

Right now I'm using ubuntu which is forcing me to choose between having children in the future and resting my laptop on my lap because it goes well over 80 degrees C whenever I play any media or connect to my desktop over vnc. Sometimes I try to play a mp3 and for some reason the os hangs, then dies. If a microkernel like minix will offer me greater stability than this, then I welcome it.


The overheating issues you mention seems to be more of a hardware issue than anything else.

I've tried running several Linux distributions in different laptops, I know my Dell used to overheat like crazy, but my ThinkPad doesn't.

Perhaps your overheating problems are caused by the hardware itself?

What laptop do you have? I do not experience any overheating issues with my ThinkPad T520, in fact, the laptop remains cool all the time. Heck, I can put the laptop on my bed compiling the full kernel in parallel and it won't overheat.

Also, read this:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/2/22/569
https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/2/24/338

Moving drivers to userspace is not a solution to buggy drivers. The solution is to keep reporting bugs so those bugs can be fixed, microkernel or not.

When drivers are stable, as they should be, microkernel vs monolithic doesn't matter much anymore IMHO. The microkernel design most likely will just be using more resources and it will feel slower with all the message-passing IPC mechanism.

Just keep reporting bugs if you find any. This is the way of stability, not microkernel.

Edited 2012-03-02 17:41 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 1

jayrulez Member since:
2011-10-17

The overheating issues you mention seems to be more of a hardware issue than anything else.

I've tried running several Linux distributions in different laptops, I know my Dell used to overheat like crazy, but my ThinkPad doesn't.

Perhaps your overheating problems are caused by the hardware itself?


I doubt it is a hardware issue as I do not have this problem when I boot into windows 7 or haiku.

I've experienced this issue on 3 different laptops while not on my netbook.

Also, read this:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/2/22/569
https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/2/24/338


I've read those already. I would not propose that the drivers in linux be moved to userspace. That would require too much work and the benefits may not justify it.

However, since minix started out as a microkernel, it had the opportunity to offer a different approach to driver development. Writing drivers in urserspace is easier than writing drivers in kernel space and may be much less error prone.

The performance loss experienced with using a microkernel may not be as much as you think.

Experiments running linux on a L4 microkernel shows linux performing less than 10% faster on average.
Copying a file and having it taking 10 seconds rather than 9 seconds is acceptable when the possibility of my system crashing because I'm playing a mp3 while i wait for my copy to finish.

Just keep reporting bugs if you find any. This is the way of stability, not microkernel.


Agreed to the point of your comma. Microkernels offer a valid solution.

You can try comparing the performance of the blackberry playbook with a similarly specced android tablet to see that microkernels aren't inherently bad for performance.

Reply Parent Score: 2

renox Member since:
2005-07-06

Too often I see Torvalds' minions spreading FUD about minix, general misconceptions etc...
Agreed: fanboys are annoying but that's not a reason to spread FUD yourself too..

Right now I'm using ubuntu which is forcing me to choose between having children in the future and resting my laptop on my lap because it goes well over 80 degrees C whenever I play any media or connect to my desktop over vnc.
FUD: micro-kernel improves modularity but performance isn't modular, so there no reason why performance would be significantly better or worst with a microkernel..

Linux has had to evolve to stay relevant. It will have to continue to evolve. So will minix.
I hope, but for now Minix has to evolve to become relevant not to stay relevant which Linux already is (more or less depending on your needs).

Reply Parent Score: 2

jayrulez Member since:
2011-10-17

This is obviously not a performance issue, but a stability issue. The performance of my laptop is just fine. However, I was expecting less crashes... And these crashes seems to be caused by a driver issue. If the issue was isolated to a single subsystem e.g sound driver, then the system would be able to restart the sound driver in a microkernel design; not so in the design of linux where the misbehaving driver will most likely crash the system.

When did minix 3 start out? How long did it take for linux to become relevant?

Reply Parent Score: 1

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johndaly Member since:
2006-01-16

Well MINIX IS releven right now. It is the only working open source microkernel *NIX we have and it is the only open source microkernel *NIX with the declared goal of working on embedded hardware. It isn't there yet but who knows what will come? I'm hopping that ideas from QNX and the HURD will find their way into MINIX. Just imagine having a free *NIX that is actually a RT kernel out of the box!

Reply Parent Score: 2

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