Technically intel is keeping it alive. Just not feeding back code.<p>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.<p>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 didn't come with a lot of programs, unlike linux distros which came with a huge collection as they still do today.<p>On a 286 it was really cool to have an actual multitasking OS though because DOS was still the main thing back then.
The primary author and evangelist of Minix is 79 years old, so maybe slowing down a bit?<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum</a>
The reason is probably that enthusiasm died out when Intel used it for their covert management engine in every x86 cpu they sell. Essentially bavkdooring all computers in the world...
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.
There's still chatter in the Google Group and GH Issues, and some GH PRs.<p><a href="https://groups.google.com/g/minix3?pli=1" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/g/minix3?pli=1</a><p><a href="https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix">https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix</a>
I think people got everything they wanted in Minix: <a href="https://lore.kernel.org/all/30th.anniversary.repost@klaava.Helsinki.FI/" rel="nofollow">https://lore.kernel.org/all/30th.anniversary.repost@klaava.H...</a>
Yeah, it's gone. Worked with a guy pre-Intel. The current tree has loads of bugs from a couple students tinkering for their projects (it even working is in question).<p>Like others have mentioned, Intel is the only (large) organisation actively developing it, but their work is not shared back.
I'm glad people are talking about this. Minix has so much potential, and it needs a community. It also has a very specific area of need, it's not like you would install it on a desktop and I doubt you can get it running with a purpose in AWS.
I'm glad this is getting brought up. Minix has so much potential and it is due for an open source community to care with a mission. Its hard to find where an org would use it since Linux is so popular and so few orgs really need a hyper reliable operating system with limited libraries and dependencies. Military or space problems?
Intel is keeping MINIX alive. If you have an Intel chip there is a remote access to your disk even when the machine is "off'. Foreign governments leverage this to spy on USA, all vulnerabilities in the Intel ME are totally accidents and not intentional.