Hacker News Reader

Comment by smcn | Hacker News Reader

MINIX 3 is the goto, I believe? At least it was when I was researching them.

https://git.minix3.org/index.cgi?p=minix.git

Happy to be wrong though, I'd like new code to look at.

Yay, since noone else has mentioned it, I get to add :) that the standard "why is minix interesting" nowadays is "it runs the Intel ME in a gazillion CPUs".

That says something about what one bunch of Very Careful Engineers think about the implementation's uptime and reliability provenance...

(The ME-cleaner project has identified that if Intel ME does not initialize, the CPU resets a few minutes after power on - so this suggests that a hard-unrecoverable error would leave the CPU unusable.)

Also, there aren't many OSs that have books to teach you about them, but MINIX does. Operating Systems: Design and Implementation by Andrew Tanenbaum. I suppose the value you get for free in MINIX 3, you pay for if you want the book...

The long flamewar between Linus and Tannenbaum was interesting to read, at least briefly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_d...

> Operating Systems: Design and Implementation by Andrew Tanenbaum

I had a student edition of that book, back in the late 1980s. It had a full listing of the Minix source code as an appendix: fascinating to be able to sit in a comfortable chair and read a large body of code. I referred to it a lot when i was learning C. I'm guessing Minix has got bigger since then though.

Yeah I believe Minix is actually a complete rewrite intended to be more useful in the real world than just a teaching toy (and at that it has been successful). I can't imagine enjoying reading the source code apendix from a book as much as you seemed to have done :D But I did learn a lot from the main text of the book. Pretty hard for me to dive into even a simple hobbyist OS and figure things out from scratch.

I was very impressed by this https://youtu.be/jMkR9VF2GNY which also states minix 3 (from the author) is now a microkernel and hosts a modified netbsd like (service based) system.

Thank you very much! Really excited to dig into this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com