In article <1992Jan29.231426.20...@klaava.Helsinki.FI> torva...@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds) writes:
The limitations of MINIX relate at least partly to my being a professor:
An explicit design goal was to make it run on cheap hardware so students
could afford it.  In particular, for years it ran on a regular 4.77 MHZ PC
with no hard disk.  You could do everything here including modify and recompile
the system.  Just for the record, as of about 1 year ago, there were two
versions, one for the PC (360K diskettes) and one for the 286/386 (1.2M).
The PC version was outselling the 286/386 version by 2 to 1.  I don't have
figures, but my guess is that the fraction of the 60 million existing PCs that
are 386/486 machines as opposed to 8088/286/680x0 etc is small.  Among students
it is even smaller. Making software free, but only for folks with enough money
to buy first class hardware is an interesting concept.
Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from now
everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5.

Amoeba was not designed to run on an 8088 with no hard disk.

A multithreaded file system is only a performance hack.  When there is only
one job active, the normal case on a small PC, it buys you nothing and adds
complexity to the code.  On machines fast enough to support multiple users,
you probably have enough buffer cache to insure a hit cache hit rate, in
which case multithreading also buys you nothing.  It is only a win when there
are multiple processes actually doing real disk I/O.  Whether it is worth
making the system more complicated for this case is at least debatable.

I still maintain the point that designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is
a fundamental error.  Be thankful you are not my student.  You would not
get a high grade for such a design :-)

MINIX was designed before POSIX, and is now being (slowly) POSIXized as
everyone who follows this newsgroup knows.  Everyone agrees that user-level
standards are a good idea.  As an aside, I congratulate you for being able
to write a POSIX-conformant system without having the POSIX standard in front
of you. I find it difficult enough after studying the standard at great length.

My point is that writing a new operating system that is closely tied to any
particular piece of hardware, especially a weird one like the Intel line,
is basically wrong.  An OS itself should be easily portable to new hardware
platforms.  When OS/360 was written in assembler for the IBM 360
25 years ago, they probably could be excused.  When MS-DOS was written
specifically for the 8088 ten years ago, this was less than brilliant, as
IBM and Microsoft now only too painfully realize. Writing a new OS only for the
386 in 1991 gets you your second 'F' for this term.  But if you do real well
on the final exam, you can still pass the course.

Prof. Andrew S. Tanenbaum (a...@cs.vu.nl)