Minix 3.2.0: One step closer to the promise of highly reliable OS

The scary thing is, is that was precisely the state of affairs with cheap desktops in the heyday of win95. My understanding is that the hardware got cheaper to match the software, then there was no motivation to improve the software, because the hardware would've crashed the machine anyhow.

You're asking this of a casual user.

Are you implying any of these activities would get back the stuff I was working on at the time? Because if not I think you sort of missed the point.

The usual arguments in a language or OS flame war are relevant here. Do you choose the allegedly superior design, or the more popular and practiced one? The answer depends on your use case, love of tinkering, tolerance for productivity risk. But were it not for people trying new designs, we'd all be writing code in assembly language on single-user systems.

I have heard this over and over, "wohoo Linus won because Tanenbaum is using git", and frankly this is just ridiculous. Their disagreement was over how the kernel should be architected, not over personal issues. Not using a certain vcs because you disagree with its author on a completely unrelated subject would really be childish.

Moreover, vcs used to manage Minix'es source has zero impact on the merit of using one kernel architecture over the other.

[EDIT]: I understand that the "kernel war" argument is not what you meant, nevertheless Minix using Git is hardly a twist in Linux vs Minix history.

It's mildly interesting. I guess it shows that PERSON_A is not an angry wingnut intent on ignoring everything from PERSON_B, but can make rational decisions about tools and software.

With some of the personalities involved in various high profile OS projects, and the numerous flame-wars, that's a useful detail.

You are right to some extent. Yet, there has been many improvements in the kernel since 1988, especially after Minix 3 was announced. And yes, the code base has significantly grown in all of drivers, user-space servers and userland.

"Ten years ago, most computer users were young people or professionals with lots of technical expertise. When things went wrong – which they often did – they knew how to fix things. Nowadays, the average user is far less sophisticated, perhaps a 12-year-old girl or a grandfather. Most of them know about as much about fixing computer problems as the average computer nerd knows about repairing his car. What they want more than anything else is a computer that works all the time, with no glitches and no failures. Many users automatically compare their computer to their television set. Both are full of magical electronics and have big screens. Most users have an implicit model of a television set: (1) you buy the set; (2) you plug it in; (3) it works perfectly without any failures of any kind for the next 10 years. They expect that from the computer, and when they do not get it, they get frustrated. When computer experts tell them: "If God had wanted computers to work all the time, He wouldn't have invented ‘Reset’ buttons" they are not impressed.

For lack of a better definition of dependability, let us adopt this one: A device is said to be dependable if 99% of the users never experience any failures during the entire period they own the device. By this definition, virtually no computers are dependable, whereas most TVs, iPods, digital cameras, camcorders, etc. are. Techies are willing to forgive a computer that crashes once or twice a year; ordinary users are not. Home users aren't the only ones annoyed by the poor dependability of computers. Even in highly technical settings, the low dependability of computers is a problem. Companies like Google and Amazon, with hundreds of thousands of servers, experience many failures every day. They have learned to live with this, but they would really prefer systems that just worked all the time. Unfortunately, current software fails them.

The basic problem is that software contains bugs, and the more software there is, the more bugs there are. Various studies have shown that the number of bugs per thousand lines of code (KLoC) varies from 1 to 10 in large production systems. A really well-written piece of software might have 2 bugs per KLoC over time, but not fewer. An operating system with, say, 4 million lines of code is thus likely to have at least 8000 bugs. Not all are fatal, but some will be. A study at Stanford University showed that device drivers – which make up 70% of the code base of a typical operating system – have bug rates 3x to 7x higher than the rest of the system. Device drivers have higher bug rates because (1) they are more complicated and (2) they are inspected less. While many people study the scheduler, few look at printer drivers.

The Solution: Smaller Kernels

The solution to this problem is to move code out of the kernel, where it can do maximal damage, and put it into user-space processes, where bugs cannot cause system crashes. This is how Minix 3 is designed."

From http://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2009/99/Minix-3

That was 20 years ago, things change in that amount of time. It was also a lot of propaganda and not a lot of evidence.

But hey, it's not like programmers need to update their Internal Information Hashmap. Just put something in there once and leave it alone since that thing is delicate and updating it can sometimes crash your mind.

Its just a semi replacement for Google code search. To be honest, its just something I play with. If something comes from it great, if not im not terribly worried about it.

This.

http://www.linuxatemyram.com/

So that applications can use it?

I'm given to understand that Debian and Arch linux have GNU Hurd live CDs out there for people who want to run it. I don't really know much about the OS, but does it meet your requirements?

That's because people and tools look at the wrong values.

    $ free -m
                 total       used       free     shared      buffers     cached
    Mem:          2009       1491        518          0          466        363
    -/+ buffers/cache:        661       1348
    Swap:         1992          0       1992

Here, you want the number 1348, which is the "free" memory you have, not the number "518" which at first glance is the "free" memory.

I didn't intend to sound the way it seems i sounded. Sorry for that! Btw, the focus of Minix 3 has changed and it is no longer intended just for research/education. Minix 3 was publicly announced on 24 October 2005 by Andrew Tanenbaum and it is comprehensively redesigned to be usable as a serious system on resource-limited and embedded computers and for applications requiring high reliability.

Not anymore:

"It was only with the third version, MINIX 3, and the third version of the book, published in 2006, that the emphasis changed from teaching to a serious research and production system, especially for embedded systems. A few of the many differences between MINIX 2 and MINIX 3 are given here.

Going forward, we are making a serious effort to turn MINIX 3 in an industrial-grade system with a focus on the embedded market, especially for those applications that need high reliability and availability."

http://www.minix3.org/other/read-more.html