MINIX from Scratch

The one thing MINIX really needs is a maintainer.<p>The 3.3.0-rc8 or whatever version has been sitting there for several years, despite all blockers already fixed. Just because there&#x27;s nobody at the helm to push the release out.<p>There&#x27;s also significant unmerged work that&#x27;s just waiting for someone to merge it.

Nice. It is a pity that this is necessary, but a quick look at the Minix online presence makes it seem as though it has been largely abandoned. Interesting, since Minix is one of those projects that is really everywhere. Still an important component in lots of firmware.

I think xv6 is a much more palatable intro to operating systems than minux. It&#x27;s a tiny codebase, with an annotated guide, and a book explaining its core ideas and implementation in a very direct way.

I promise that this is a good-faith question: is MINIX still the best OS teaching tool? Personally, I enjoyed the lectures of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rust-class.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rust-class.org&#x2F;</a>, though the Rust code itself may be a little outdated (it&#x27;s from 2014).

I don&#x27;t get it. Tannenbaum would normally keep it in a buildable state -- he&#x27;s basically the Linus of Minix no?<p>As an aside I enjoy the irony that we are trying to build Minix on Linux systems many years after the debate...

oh man, this was part of my intro to operating systems programming (not that I have a clue what I&#x27;m doing) in school 13 years ago. a month or two of &quot;os&quot; work in a simulated kernel on the JVM, and then in the last 3 or 4 weeks the professor hit me with &quot;here&#x27;s minix, play with some these changes for homework&quot;, and then the final exam was &quot;make these changes to the filesystem module&quot;.<p>Worst I ever did in a CS class. I did not deserve whatever grade he gave me, but I was the only person that stuck it out and didn&#x27;t drop the class.

I was curious about the statement in the README:<p>&gt;&quot;Until now, I have not been able to find a MINIX 3 project that allows you to compile the code that is referenced in the book Operating Systems: Design and Implementation (3e) (v3.1.0).&quot;<p>For such a well-known and longstanding project I was surprised to read this. Are the sources available at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.minix3.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.minix3.org</a> just too old or is this more to do with the book?

In case anyone else is interested, I ran across a similar project called Fiwix yesterday, and it compiles and boots:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fiwix.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fiwix.org&#x2F;</a><p>&gt; Fiwix is an operating system kernel written from scratch, based on the UNIX architecture and fully focused on being POSIX compatible. It is designed and developed mainly as a hobby OS and, since it serves also for educational purposes, the kernel code is kept as simple as possible for the benefit of students and OS enthusiasts. It is small in size (less than 50K lines of code), runs on the i386 hardware platform and is compatible with a good base of existing GNU applications.

Amazing to see that every file and directory name is short single word with very few exceptions.

I remember having to rewrite the file blocking primitives to allow blocking only some sections of each file as a class assignment in college.<p>It was fun, and I learned a lot about OSs in that class.

Do we have virtual memory API at the network level ? The goal is i can use Redis as my real memory.

Is the book worth reading?

How can it be from scratch if you start with MINIX?

&gt; MINIX from Scratch<p>Can you install gcc and X ?

How about creating an OS from scratch without bias from existing designs?