For those trying to install / use / compile Minix in 2026

[Namizono Shinichi / W.F.G. van Rooijen]

If you are interested to try Minix-3 in 2026 (or thereafter), find below my experiences. Then, decide for yourself whether you are still interested.

Short summary: the pre-compiled versions (Minix-3.3.0 and Minix-3.4.0rc6) work ONLY on in a virtual machine (KVM QEMU, etc); it is not / no longer possible to compile Minix; and there is no good way to install Minix on "current" hardware. In short: Minix is not / no longer available as an actual OS for an actual machine.

- Installation on PC: Minix-3 does __not__ support USB, wireless network, or SMP. There is very limited support for Ethernet cards, and those are (by now) quite old cards (let's say at least 10 to 15 years old if not older). Because there is no support for USB there is no live-USB and thus no option to install from USB key. There are instructions on the minix wiki to "cross install" Minix by booting from "some other" live-USB (maybe Ubuntu or System Rescue CD), and then installing Minix-3, but even then the support for modern hard disks is very limited (not to mention things like sound, USB, BlueTooth, wireless network, etc). Even if the installation succeeds, I doubt that minix would work on "modern" hardware

- I tried to compile Minix from the sources. I started with Minix-3.4.0rc6 and then tried to compile the development version. Results are:

• "native" compilation, i.e. compilation on minix in a virtual machine: the installation process "gets stuck", without warning, error message, or otherwise. I tried to abort and restart the calculation a few times, and I managed to re-compile and reboot Minix, but the compilation process is simply "unreliable" (and very slow, as minix can only use 1 CPU)
• cross compilation: I tried to cross-compile on Ubuntu 24.02, but all of the available C-compilers failed (things like extern / static definitions, missing function declarations, etc). GCC, clang, and TinyCC (tcc), all three failed. In other words: the source code of Netbsd / minix (which is at least 10 to 15 years old) has to be brought up-to-date in order to compile (and I simply lack the skills to go into the source code for things like nbsed and nbmake (part of Netbsd) to correct the errors)

Conclusion: I have given up. Given the state of the minix website and github repository, it appears that the last updates were added in 2017, and the project has since been abandoned.

I might still be interesting to download the latest source code to study together with the Minix text book, but since minix-3 does not compile on a virtual machine nor in cross-compilation, it is interesting from an academic point of view, but not as a potential practical OS for actual hardware.

[Subhash Rayudu Pinnamaneni]

Have you tried installing on beaglebone black Device it has an open source arm processor

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[Денис Миронов]

Minix compiles fine on Ubuntu. To do this, you need to install gcc7 via update-alternatives. Minix doesn't run on modern hardware – that's true. I have an old Pentium M and a Beaglebone Black. I'm currently rewriting Minix for modern computers. The moc repository is https://github.com/dmironoff/reminix. I'm currently writing a full-fledged smp. Plans include ports to aarch64, amd64, and risc-v64. I'm currently working on the arm32 port. I plan to release the first kernel version with the new architecture in a month – stay tuned for announcements. Also, please join our Telegram group @minix3.

сб, 4 апр. 2026 г., 13:49 Subhash Rayudu Pinnamaneni <psub...@gmail.com>:

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[Денис Миронов]

I have available: Pentium M (standard i586), Intel Atom (old eye PC), modern AMD Ryzen (I don't remember the model number, but it has 6 cores), Beaglebone Black (one core Arm32 Cortex A8), Orange Pi PC+ (Allwinner H3, 4 Cortex A7 cores), Raspberry Pi 3 model B+ (aarch64), Raspberry Pi 4 (aarch64), and soon a single-board PC with risc-v Allwinner D1 will arrive.

 These are the platforms on which I plan to implement ReMinix. 

Sorry for the English - I'm too lazy to think, I'm writing through Google Translate. 

I have many plans, but they all require, first and foremost, major changes to the kernel and virtual memory manager. I'm currently working on this. 

Seriously, within a month I'll release a kernel with full Arm32 support. I'm immediately separating everything into layers, so the architecture-dependent code will remain only in the kernel HAL. So it will be as easily portable as possible across different OS platforms.

 Current progress: I've written a complete hal for the Orange Pi PC+ and am currently finishing up the smp. A little later, I'll finish the new ipc for the virtual memory manager, then rework it.

 And then, with peace of mind, I'll work on the new service and driver hierarchy. I've already sketched out a bit about USB, but there's a lot to do. 

Basically, I'm out of work in my country. If I don't starve to death or they don't completely block our internet access, I'll finish this by summer. =)

I've been working with embedded systems on Linux and Android my whole life, as well as low-level development. I've written many Linux drivers for proprietary projects for my clients and employers. But an entire OS is a truly new challenge, even though I read Tanenbaum's books as a teenager.

сб, 4 апр. 2026 г., 16:45 Денис Миронов <denismi...@gmail.com>:

[Subhash Rayudu Pinnamaneni]

That is great project you took up we should write minix source code for all the open source architectures

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[Денис Миронов]

That's exactly what I was thinking. But there are the most popular ones: x86, amd64, arm, aarch32, and risc-v64. Implementing these architectures will give minix a future, especially since minix is ​​an excellent OS for embedded hardware. 

By the way, I've already built IPC acceleration methods into the kernel architecture: arm and risc-v have ASID, and amd64 has PCID. 

Both of these things work logically the same way—it's just that the MMU and L1/L2 Cache have data about the context number loaded into the virtual memory table root register. 

The OS kernel keeps track of these context numbers. 

During context switches, the processor cache lines are assigned a context number, and during process switches and system calls, the executable code is most likely already in the processor cache. 

Without this feature, a microkernel OS on modern hardware is completely uncompetitive. 

Plus, arm, aarch64, and risc-v have two virtual memory table root registers—one for the process and one for the kernel. Together, they create a single, contiguous address space, and when switching processes, only one process virtual memory register can be remapped—this also greatly speeds up context switching. I also built support for this feature into the architecture. More precisely, I moved part of the kernel logic code to architecture-dependent code. 

In short, there are a lot of features.

 I really want to write multithreading support like netbsd in the kernel later, but that would require a complete rewrite of the ipc system, since endpoint_t currently points to a process, whereas it should point to a thread. So full compatibility with libpthread will come much later.

сб, 4 апр. 2026 г., 19:37 Subhash Rayudu Pinnamaneni <psub...@gmail.com>:

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[Subhash Rayudu Pinnamaneni]

First we must try to write a compiler for  processors available in the open market like the ones available in opencores.org even that will take a lot of effort 

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[Денис Миронов]

Ooooh! I didn't know about this project. Thanks! I'll study it in my spare time. I haven't written compilers yet - that will be fun.

сб, 4 апр. 2026 г., 21:30 Subhash Rayudu Pinnamaneni <psub...@gmail.com>:

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[Subhash Rayudu Pinnamaneni]

Intel or amd or m1 or m2 all these proprietary they won't give out their architectures minix os is specifically a microkernel so that it should have the capability of saving the processor's registers to swap memory or ram when some other process or pid is taking up or shifting the mpu or processor alu and l1 l2  cache so you would want to know what exactly the processor mpu registers are l1 l2 cache how many cores how many alu internal bus. Microkernel uses the mpu to the fullest capacity is what I felt

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[Денис Миронов]

Yes, the microkernel is forced to use the MMU's full capabilities.

сб, 4 апр. 2026 г., 21:57 Subhash Rayudu Pinnamaneni <psub...@gmail.com>:

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[Namizono Shinichi / W.F.G. van Rooijen]

Interesting, my earlier messages did not attract any attention, but I guess that this one did.

Perhaps I should have been more specific:

If I go to the store and buy a new desktop PC, I can select Windows (one provider) or Linux (various providers) and use the full capabilities of the PC, to browse the internet, play a game, do office work, listen to music, using modern peripherals based on USB and Bluetooth.

In this scenario, MINIX is not an alternative, since it can do none of those tasks. In fact, it is doubtful that you could actually boot the PC on MINIX. And if you try to improve MINIX, you run into the fact that the source code cannot be compiled with modern compilers.

In other words: interesting as a hobby or from an academic perspective, but not available as an actual OS to run an actual PC.

[Namizono Shinichi / W.F.G. van Rooijen]

"I'm currently rewriting Minix for modern computers. The moc repository is https://github.com/dmironoff/reminix. I'm currently writing a full-fledged smp. Plans include ports to aarch64, amd64, and risc-v64. I'm currently working on the arm32 port. I plan to release the first kernel version with the new architecture in a month – stay tuned for announcements. Also, please join our Telegram group @minix3."

Please send a message to this group in due course. I would be interested in the AMD64 version (for desktop PC), if it can be compiled with a modern C compiler (GCC or clang). One tip: apparently, "MINIX" is the name of a Hong Kong based brand of computer peripherals, so perhaps call it "MinixOS", or, in your case, DENIX? :-)

2026年4月4日土曜日 22:46:23 UTC+9 Денис Миронов:

[Namizono Shinichi / W.F.G. van Rooijen]

"Minix compiles fine on Ubuntu. To do this, you need to install gcc7 via update-alternatives."

In other words: MINIX __does not__ "compile fine" on Ubuntu - it requires a downgrade to a specific old version of a specific compiler.

A better phrasing would be: "Minix can be compiled on Ubuntu; you need to install gcc7 via update-alternatives"

[Денис Миронов]

I agree, I'll soon package my fork's source code in Docker. It'll be easier that way. Then cross-compilation will be easy on both Linux and Windows with Linux environment support enabled.

вс, 5 апр. 2026 г., 03:24 Namizono Shinichi / W.F.G. van Rooijen <w.f.g.va...@gmail.com>:

"Minix compiles fine on Ubuntu. To do this, you need to install gcc7 via update-alternatives."

In other words: MINIX __does not__ "compile fine" on Ubuntu - it requires a downgrade to a specific old version of a specific compiler.

A better phrasing would be: "Minix can be compiled on Ubuntu; you need to install gcc7 via update-alternatives"

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[Peter Shkenev]

Hello,

> If I go to the store and buy a new desktop PC, I can select Windows
> (one provider) or Linux (various providers) and use the full
> capabilities of the PC, to browse the internet, play a game, do office
> work, listen to music, using modern peripherals based on USB and
> Bluetooth.

If you are looking for a production-ready desktop OS, you have clearly
came to the wrong place.

In this world, there are only three such OS'es: Windows, Linux, Mac OS.
And this is not going to change anytime soon, because it is extremely
hard to make such an OS.

Take GPUs for example. They are crucial for good desktop experience. But
those are complex and diverse devices, to the point you can't write a
driver without vendor involvement. Amdgpu driver for Linux alone
consists of several millions lines of code. And we're not talking
Vulkan/OpenGL drivers. In result, there is the only one open source
feature complete GPU stack in the world: Linux DRM + Mesa. Every other
open source OS wishing to run modern GUI software has to port it
(FreeBSD and OpenBSD do). Haiku has enough will to carry its own
infrastructure and they have ported NVidia's open driver, but that is
because it was designed to be portable. Not sure if they have OpenGL
working, better ask them though.

There are many more aspects that are difficult to tackle as well: WI-FI
is hard, Bluetooth is hard, sound hardware is hard, laptop hardware is
hard and quirky and vendor-specific, etc etc.

There is also need for userspace infrastructure, it is also non-trivial.

Then there is also a non-trivial problem of making all of this work on a
microkernel OS.

Even if Minix was not abandoned, supporting all of this would be
infeasible for a rather small team which used to maintain Minix. And
even actively developed and more advanced microkernel OSes, such as
Redox and Managarm can not be considered production-ready, despite the
effort.

Making an actual production-ready OS would cost you billions of dollars
and gargantuan amount of manpower. Hence, the status quo is going to
stand as is.

> And if you try to improve MINIX, you run into the fact that the source
> code cannot be compiled with modern compilers.

This is actually easy to fix. There are already patches that allow
building Minix with GCC 11, one needs to update them accordingly. GCC
developers publish porting guides for each major version, they are
helpful.

[Subhash Rayudu Pinnamaneni]

Ya right billions of dollars. You know what they do with a billion dollars. 

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[Subhash Rayudu Pinnamaneni]

They grow seedless grapes 

[Namizono Shinichi / W.F.G. van Rooijen]

The MINIX website is still available and describes "hundreds of available packages" (the netbsd software), X windows, clang compiler, ethernet support.

I was fully prepared that MINIX would not work "out of the box" but the current sitaution is that MINIX really only runs reliably in a virtual machine - which kind of defeats the purpose for me: if I need an OS to run another OS, then there really is no point.

I am sure that all problems can be solved, and I am willing to invest some time into a project but I think that the current state of MINIX is just too much for me.

I started this thread to share my experiences for others who may be interested. 

2026年4月6日月曜日 1:08:26 UTC+9 Peter Shkenev:

[Денис Миронов]

Write to me denism...@gmail.com

пн, 6 апр. 2026 г., 13:39 Namizono Shinichi / W.F.G. van Rooijen <w.f.g.va...@gmail.com>:

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[Subhash Rayudu Pinnamaneni]

It's still working for me on the vmware and beaglebone black

Though I did not try it on a separate pc

[Денис Миронов]

On Pentium M(i586) and older is also still working =) 

пн, 6 апр. 2026 г., 13:47 Subhash Rayudu Pinnamaneni <psub...@gmail.com>:

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[Namizono Shinichi / W.F.G. van Rooijen]

The oldest version of GCC on Ubuntu 24.02 is gcc-9, and apparently I need gcc-7 to compile  MINIX.

So, that's it for me. I will not pursue MINIX. But at least I tried.

2026年4月6日月曜日 21:19:21 UTC+9 Денис Миронов:

[Денис Миронов]

Try to add http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu to sources list of apt.

пн, 6 апр. 2026 г., 16:51 Денис Миронов <denismi...@gmail.com>:

Try to add http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu  to sources list of apt.

пн, 6 апр. 2026 г., 15:33 Namizono Shinichi / W.F.G. van Rooijen <w.f.g.va...@gmail.com>:

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[Namizono Shinichi / W.F.G. van Rooijen]

You are a good advocate for MINIX and I am tempted to try. But even if I can compile MINIX, there would be no USB and my ethernet card is also probably not supported. 

I have decided: If you manage to make your updated MINIX available for PC, send a message to this group and I will try out your software, but that is as far as I will go ;-)) 

2026年4月6日月曜日 22:53:17 UTC+9 Денис Миронов:

[Денис Миронов]

Agreed. Just yesterday, my friends gave me another computer for my developments. A netbook with an Intel Atom n450. It's one of the first mobile processors to support x86-64. Excellent hardware, which allows me to understand this architecture using a simple example.

вт, 7 апр. 2026 г., 01:03 Namizono Shinichi / W.F.G. van Rooijen <w.f.g.va...@gmail.com>:

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[ss l]

Yes and no. You can buy hardware today that runs Minix right out of the box, as well as it ever did. I am referring to hardware running on the DM&P Vortex86, such as the Diamond Systems Helios computer. You can build an image on a modern computer, installing Minix using floppy disk images as God intended, copy that to a CompactFlash card, pop that into the Helios machine and have a fully functional, contemporary computer that runs Minix with its own keyboard, serial port, network adapter (!!) and VGA out. It doesn't have a printer port, but it does have an ISA-compatible PC/104 bus and you can add that too if you want. You can buy a dot-matrix printer from Epson and connect it to that printer port and truly enjoy computing.

Now does Minix work on "off the shelf" contemporary hardware -- the answer is no and the reason is that basically, starting with the Skylake processor, the philosophy that PC hardware should be cross-compatible and backwards-compatible was abandoned. At that point, it was presumed that users could be expected to run the newest version of Windows or Linux so as long as the OS was suitably patched to run the new hardware, compatibility was not needed. This has made it extraordinarily difficult to support new operating systems on cutting-edge hardware. That's on top of the fact that Minix was built with some specific assumptions in mind such as running on a single-core machine, and not supporting USB, and relying on BIOS/CSM, and once you've altered Minix to account for all those changes, it's really not Minix anymore it's your own operating system, in the same way that Linus Torvalds bootstrapped Minix into Linux.

The question is, why are you wanting to run Minix. If your reason is anything other than a desire to program for its own sake, it is probably not the right OS for you. Minix was originally built to be compatible with V7 Research Unix. Which was released in 1979. It was later tweaked for POSIX compatibility but you're talking about running an OS that was designed to specs that are 50 years old. Professor Tanenbaum retired in 2014 as well. If you want to have a project like porting Minix to the Nintendo 64 or something like that, it makes complete sense to work on the project. Otherwise...

 

Ralf Neeb presented at Minix Con in 2016 about the various x86 boards he had ported to, which were not horribly out of date by that point. I was hoping to figure out if his changes had made it into the "current tree". 

[Денис Миронов]

I completely agree, Minix is ​​currently programming for the sake of programming. It's impossible to catch up with Linux, and in my opinion, it's foolish to try it from scratch. If you want to catch up with Linux on a microkernel, I recommend looking at GNU/Hurd. Although Hurd has the same problems as Minix now, at least there's interest in it from the Linux community—Debian and Gentoo are making separate Hurd distributions.

 I'm working on Minix because I want to test the idea of ​​creating a virtual machine for system servers and drivers at the microkernel level. I'm not talking about emulation, but an abstraction separated from the actual hardware, so that architecture-specific code is confined to the OS kernel. 

Currently, Minix3 has architecture-specific code crammed into all system servers. 

I enjoy developing cool features for modern processors, but it's important to understand that a microkernel will always be slower than a monolithic one like Linux. A microkernel has its advantages—reliability and security. 

 I used to write Linux drivers for various small, semi-proprietary projects in Russia. But I hadn't had any experience with architecture design, so I'm interested. 

It's programming for programming's sake.

ср, 8 апр. 2026 г., 07:41 ss l <412...@gmail.com>:

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[Namizono Shinichi / W.F.G. van Rooijen]

About 25 years ago, when I was a PhD student, I was working with a variety of OS: Windows, linux, but also SunOS, Solaris, IRIX, NeXTstep, and VMS. This was also a period when many "new" OS were anounced, such as BeOS. This was also the period of the big court cases against Microsoft (the bundling of Internet Explorer, the fake error messages in some versions of DOS and Windows 3, etc).

I read the MINIX book in that time, to learn about the concepts of OS, but I never considered to actually install it on a PC.

I bought my current PC in 2016 and at that time, I installed MINIX-3 and as far as I remember, it did run (even if perhaps not perfect). But then there was no C-compiler under MINIX and no X-windows, so I finally decided to go back to linux (Gentoo linux at the time).

This winter I had some time to spare, so I thought it might be interesting to see the current state of "new" OS. I tried MINIX-3, mostly because I had good memories of the text book. I was hoping that it would "mostly" work and then I could compile some extra packages here and there along the way. I guess idea was.... Opimistic, to say the least.

As a side note, I am also looking at GENODE/SculptOS as an alternative OS. As an old linux-fart I am not sure how to describe my experience so far, but if I have to use key words, I would say "(very) frustrating", "confusing", "incomprehensible".... Nothing positive, thus far ... For example: for "safety", ScultOS runs entirely in RAM (booting from a sort of Live-USB). Very "safe" perhaps, but also very frustrating, because you have to copy the configuation files to the USB key if you want to use them for the next boot. So in many cases, you reboot the PC and all settings are "back to zero". I have not been able to find a way to save these files automatically upon logout. It feels like they (re-)invented the "autistic PC".

2026年4月8日水曜日 13:41:06 UTC+9 ss l:

[Денис Миронов]

I also have very fond memories of Tanenbaum's books. One of them is now lying next to me as a reference – Modern Operating Systems, 4th Edition. I work on Ubuntu Linux, as I also believe that a desktop OS should be as easy to use as possible.

ср, 8 апр. 2026 г., 14:11 Namizono Shinichi / W.F.G. van Rooijen <w.f.g.va...@gmail.com>:

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[Денис Миронов]

I also learned to program on an Intel 386 when I was young, and that's when I read Tanenbaum's first book, The Minix Book, about Minix development—operating systems design and implementation. In Russia, it came with a CD containing the source code and a ready-to-run operating system. Those were good times.

ср, 8 апр. 2026 г., 14:21 Денис Миронов <denismi...@gmail.com>:

[Subhash Rayudu Pinnamaneni]

I generally install minix 3.4 using cd image

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