Status of MINIX 3
Andy Tanenbaum
have been for keeping MINIX going. Some of the many people who have
helped tremendously in the past are Kees Bot, Philip Homburg, Al
Woodhull, Claudio Tantignone, Michael Temari, and, Giovanni Falzoni,
but there are more. My thanks to all of you.
My group is now working on a new and much improved MINIX 3. This is a
serious effort, with two experienced, professional programmers working
full time on it now, not to mention various students. The goal for the
first release is the end of October 2005. The main goals of MINIX 3
are to be small, reliable and secure. Numerous other improvements are in
the works including longer file names, bigger memories and disks, more
real-time friendly, better security, etc.
I would appreciate your not publicizing this now. It is far
better to wait until there is a solid product available for downloading.
Having a lot of people judging a pre-alpha release as the final product
will be very bad PR.
I see a serious 'market' for MINIX 3 in several areas, among them:
1. Education, as has always been the case. The book is being updated.
2. Low-end PCs. Various organizations are working on PCs that will
sell for under $100 in India and China and will be powered by
batteries recharged by a crank, solar cells, or other sources of
power where there is no electricity. An operating system for these
limited computers must be small, resource efficient, and reliable.
3. Embedded systems such as DVD players, digital cameras and camcorders,
TV sets, cell phones, and the like often have an operating system
with multiprogramming and a hierarchical file system. They often need
to be highly modular. Some are real time.
4, Companies who want a small (real-time) modular, open source operating
system free of the GPL. MINIX is and will continue to be released
under the BSD license.
I am looking for volunteers to help out. Areas where help is wanted include:
1. Porting software. A list of programs that we already have
(or are working on) is given below. Other programs are welcome. See
below for a few suggestions.
2. Porting drivers. Examples are
- disk drivers (IDE with DMA, S-ATA, SCSI)
- Ethernet drivers other than RealTek and Intel Pro/100
- USB and FireWire drivers, especially USB CD-ROMs
- Printer drivers of all kinds
- Audio drivers,
- mouse drivers
- etc., etc.
3. Porting MINIX 3 to hardware platforms other than the Pentium. Some
work is underway for the PowerPC and ARM7, but others are welcome.
4. Porting new file systems. Since a file system is just a user program,
multiple file systems can run at the same time. The Linux Ext3 file
system is an obvious candidate. The CP/M file system would be fine
for a digital camera.
5. More and tougher test suites (POSIX and application programs).
6. Testing MINIX 3 on various hardware configurations.
Other suggestions are welcome. Since we are now finalizing the OS itself
for the book, we are NOT looking for help the the OS itself right now.
A prototype for the new Website is at www.minix.net. This is about MINIX 2,
but shows you the new style. Comments are welcome.
We are also looking for a name and a logo. Current OSes have penguins,
longhorns, tigers, daemons, and whatnot as symbols. Maybe we need an
animate symbol too. Something that suggests small, tough, reliable, might
be nice. I thought of the cockroach, but it got shot down internally because
although they are tough as nails and have survived 300 million years, they
are still bugs. And they are not cute. Maybe a female 'mailman' instead?
Comments to me and thanks for braving this long period of inactivity.
Andy Tanenbaum (a...@cs.vu.nl)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here are the programs we already have or are working on:
Makefile comm finger isoread nice rm termcap
aal compress flex join nl rmdir test
add_route copy fmt kermit nm roff tget
advent cp fold kill nohup rsh time
ascii crc fortune last nonamed scripts touch
ash cron fsck lbracket od sed tr
at csplit fsck1 leave passwd seq traverse
atrun cut ftp life paste setuidgid treecmp
autil date ftpd link patch sh true
awk dd gather ln pathchk sha1sum tsort
backup de gcc login perl shar ttt
badblocks decomp16 getty logname pine shred tty
banner df gomoku look ping simple umount
basename dhrystone grep lp pinky size uname
bash diff groff lpd pr sleep unexpand
bc dircolors gunzip ls pr_routes sort uniq
bison dirname gzip m4 prep split unlink
btoa dis88 head mail pretty stat unshar
byacc diskcheck host make printenv strings update
cal diskusage hostaddr man printf strip uptime
calendar du hostid md5 printroot stty users
cat dw hostname md5sum proto su uud
cawf echo i386 men ptx sum uue
cd ed i86 mesg pwd swapfs vol
cdiff eject ibm mined pwdauth sync wc
cgrep elle ic mkdir rarpd synctree whatsnew
chgrp elvis id mkfifo rcp tac which
chmem emacs ifconfig mkfs readall tail who
chmod env ifdef mknod readfs talk whoami
chown expand in.fingerd mkproto readlink talkd width
chroot expr in.rld modem reboot tar write
ci factor in.rshd mount recover tcpd xargs
cksum false indent mref remove tee X11
clr fgrep inodes mt remsync telnet yap
cmp file install mv rev telnetd yes
co find irdpd ncheck rlogin term zmodem
Some programs for which we don't have any version or only an old version are
listed below. Some require X11, which we don't have yet, so these should
probably wait until X11 is ported. These are only examples. Anything
useful is welcome. Here is the list:
antiword, arpwatch, autoconf, automake, baselayout, bind, bittorrent, bochs,
bzip2, calc, cdrecord, chat, chimera, cpio, debuggers, diffutils, expr,
firewall (e.g., openBSD's pf), flex, gawk, gdb, valgrind, gmake, gnupg, gpm,
gv, httpd, inews, ispell, joe, jpeg, jpg, languages (LISP, Prolog, TCL, ...),
leafnode, less, lmbench, lrzsz, lynx2, mgetty, mh, modutils, mp3 player,
mpegaudio, mtools, mush, mutt, ncftp, ncurses, netpbm, nmh, nntpclnt, ntp,
nvi, openssh (ssh, scp, etc.), partition manager, popper, procmail, procps
(free, pgrep, pkill, pmap, pwdx, skill, slabtop, snice, tload, top), psmisc
(fuser, killall, pstree), python, qpopper, rcs, readline, rsync, samba,
screen, shadow, smail, smake, sox, subversion, sudo, syslogd, talk, tcpdump,
tex, timezone, top, traceroute, transfig, trn, tzcode, unzip, vi, nvi, vim,
vmail, vtwm, wget, wusage, xcdplayer, xearth, xfig, xli, xli, xmodem, xpaint,
xv, zcrypt, zip, zsh and other shells,
Major libraries (e.g., zlib, pthreads, libpcap, libpng) are also welcome
Test suites are very welcome, including tests of TCP (synfloods, bad packets),
POSIX tests, and stress tests that push the system very hard.
Stian Sletner
order to help out with porting and such, wouldn't we need to download
the system-in-progress?
Also, most of the links on the new page are broken. And, well, the new
design is, uhm, maybe a bit '70s. :)
* Andy Tanenbaum wrote:
:
| We are also looking for a name and a logo. Current OSes have penguins,
| longhorns, tigers, daemons, and whatnot as symbols. Maybe we need an
| animate symbol too. Something that suggests small, tough, reliable, might
| be nice. I thought of the cockroach, but it got shot down internally because
| although they are tough as nails and have survived 300 million years, they
| are still bugs. And they are not cute. Maybe a female 'mailman' instead?
Why don't we just stick a pair of eyes and a tail on the M and call it
an animal.
--
Stian Sletner
Fred J. Scipione
"Andy Tanenbaum" <a...@cs.vu.nl> wrote in message
news:d9jpnr$j...@cs.vu.nl...
...<snip>...
> Other suggestions are welcome. Since we are now finalizing the OS
> itself
> for the book, we are NOT looking for help the the OS itself right now.
Granted, its just kibitzing, but I hope you considered the thread
about 'Future Minix' from Jan. 19th, 2000 (including my response of
Jan. 24th).
> A prototype for the new Website is at www.minix.net. This is about
> MINIX 2,
> but shows you the new style. Comments are welcome.
>
> We are also looking for a name and a logo. Current OSes have penguins,
> longhorns, tigers, daemons, and whatnot as symbols. Maybe we need an
> animate symbol too. Something that suggests small, tough, reliable,
> might be nice. I thought of the cockroach, but it got shot down
> internally because although they are tough as nails and have survived
> 300 million years, they are still bugs. And they are not cute. Maybe
> a female 'mailman' instead?
>
> Comments to me, and thanks for braving this long period of inactivity.
>
> Andy Tanenbaum (a...@cs.vu.nl)
>
...<snip>...
I think the canonical image of a message passing system is two
high-school girls at their desks, exchanging a folded slip of
paper :-). Maybe just the hands and the note?
I hope my posted up-date to 'diff' is included. I can offer
an updated 'man' page for the new diff options, too.
colone...@yahoo.com
> Also, most of the links on the new page are broken. And, well, the new
> design is, uhm, maybe a bit '70s. :)
Hey, I -loved- the web page designs in the '70s.
>
> * Andy Tanenbaum wrote:
> >
> > We are also looking for a name and a logo.
> Why don't we just stick a pair of eyes and a tail on the M and call it
> an animal.
At one time I tried to draw something like the big (mechanical?) spider
from Johnny Quest out of the M. It didn't work well but it might have been
lack of talent...
My suggestion: A horny toad, like you've certainly seen standing in for
dinosaurs in one movie or another. (for political reasons "horned lizard"
may be a prefered term)
ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/graphics/book_covers/hi-res/0596001843.jpg
http://www.humboldt.edu/~rap1/Herps/Lizards/009.jpg
Other possibilities, (several previously suggested):
A (draft) horse, w/ collar, kinda (but not too much!) like Horace.
An Armadillo
A bull dog (Warneresqe. --Big up front, tiny backside. Spiked collar)
A mechanical mouse w. a big wind-up key.
A mouse w/ the M on his shirt.
A polar Bear (south->penguins, north->polar bears)
Other insects have been suggested, like a ladybug or an ant
A worm or caterpillar (maybe not a worm)
A Frog
An alligator
A wombat/mole/vole/unidentified but small & furry.
Pegasus or other mythical critter/charactor
An angel (calm those anti-bsd daemon types)
A witch (further upset those abdt)
A duck
Scales, a duck & a witch (get the monty python fans)
Alien or bug-eyed monster
A robot (named Isaac?)
Note that slackware linux has a person. Maybe a Dr. Tee?
Oliver Wendell Jones and/or the banana 9000 (hey, you can ask,)
Or maybe even Veronica Karlsson's ascii Kitten (with permission of
course):
/\ ) ..
|-| /||
|-| / \
|-|_________.' (|\
| | | | | | | > )
| | | | | | ` .__.'
\ / | | | /
)--)-----|-||
(--(( |-||
\__)) \__)) vk
--I think ehat ever is picked should have an ascii-art version.
CC
colone...@yahoo.com
> We are also looking for a name and a logo.
> Maybe a female 'mailman' instead?
Yeah, he'd make a good mascot. Your gonna make
a lady out of him, huh?
I also like the robot w/ the box of mail on
Computer networks, 3rd edition too.
Or a pigeon w/ a mail bag like on "stop that pigeon"
http://www.hotink.com/wacky/dastrdly/bird2.gif
(I'd mix in a good dollop of Walt Kelly's Mallard
De Mer in the drawing --though I can't find an
online pic)
3ch
chandan
David Given
[...]
> 2. Porting drivers. Examples are
> - disk drivers (IDE with DMA, S-ATA, SCSI)
It might be useful to investigate compatibility frameworks that would allow
other OS' drivers to be used; for example, the BSD network driver model is
very clean and efficient (and their drivers tend to be extremely well
written). Being able to link one of their drivers with a library and then
use the result as a Minix driver would be a huge bonus.
[...]
> 3. Porting MINIX 3 to hardware platforms other than the Pentium. Some
> work is underway for the PowerPC and ARM7, but others are welcome.
I have an 8MB-RAM MMUless ARM7 device that I'd be interested in doing a port
to; Minix would make a great alternative to ucLinux, which I'm not very
keen on.
Incidentally, will Minix 3 still support 16-bit systems?
[...]
> Other suggestions are welcome. Since we are now finalizing the OS itself
> for the book, we are NOT looking for help the the OS itself right now.
It would be a fairly large project, but you might want to consider building
a Debian platform around the Minix kernel. Debian isn't limited to Linux;
there are versions based around the HURD, NetBSD and FreeBSD kernels. This
would certainly require a 32-bit Minix, and probably require a MMU, but it
would solve the whole software bootstrapping problem at a stroke, and
provide obvious proof of capability.
> A prototype for the new Website is at www.minix.net. This is about MINIX
> 2, but shows you the new style. Comments are welcome.
I like it. Clean and well-organised. The colour scheme is a little 80s, but
that's not necessarily a drawback.
--
+- David Given --McQ-+ "`Aplysia californica' is your taxonomic
| d...@cowlark.com | nomenclature.
| (d...@tao-group.com) | A slug, by any other name, is still a slug by
+- www.cowlark.com --+ nature." --- drushel on a.f.c
deep...@gmail.com
MINIX 3 .. a great news for me.
>4, Companies who want a small (real-time) modular, open source >operating
> system free of the GPL.
I am interestd on the Real-Time systems and I am studying Minix and its
Real-Time implementations like RT-MINIX.
http://www.sce.carleton.ca/faculty/wainer/rt-minix/rt-minix.html
This kind of Real-Time extentsons can be incorporate in to the main
stream.
I like to help to improve the Real-Time nature of the system.
MINIX is and will continue to be >released
> under the BSD license.
A good marketing point.
How about a Bee as Tux in Linux
www.legis.state.wi.us/lrb/bb/images/symbols/bee.jpg
GNU/Deep
chunhui_true
where to get the stuff that deep introduce MINIX 3??
Irene Tziortzioti
an open source OS requires. The ant is also powerful; it can carry about 30
times its weight
Irene Tziortzioti
Christos Karayiannis
Andy,
The most appropriate symbol that can represent Minix is certainly a flying
squirrel. Cute, star shaped and born to be airborne.
See
http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?p=flying+squirrel&ei=UTF-8&fr=F
P-tab-web-t&fl=0&x=wrt or the first of the pictures below for a model.
Others can be found at yahoo, by making 'image' search for flying squirrel.
Christos
Charles Littlefield
code of MINIX 2 with modifications and extensions or is it a total rewrite
from the ground up?
Sanky
I believe that apart from the porting and the development process for
release 3, the minix community should also start a process for
regulating and categorizing different software ports to the minix
platform. Although, this may at first sound like impeding the growth of
the platform, I think this is a tremendous opportunity for minix to
score over Linux and other so called "Open source" systems. The reason
why I suggest this is twofold:
>Since minix is largely used by academic community, porting and including everything will eventually lead to a
titanic distribution - the way it has happened with Fedor/Red hat and
almost all other linux distributions. Trust me,
most users are not even aware of what those 6 installation CD's
contain. Such huge distributions overwhelm the user
at first and restrict the growth. Most students dont really need that
much software.
>Almost all users dont need everything. A better option would be to provide the core OS as one unit and other
software as optional different pacakges/bundles, according to their
respective functions e.g- Admin
package, Developer package etc.
I think since minix is only in its nascent stages, the earlier such
classification is adopted, the better.
Comments are welcome.
Further, I also express my will to port Minix to AMD 64 bit platform,
since I have one such machine. Although, I would initially be porting
the core, I would be greatful if someone could provide me with some
leads about device drivers, esp. sound and video. I already have the
linux source code for my display card so porting should not be such a
big issue.
Anyways, helps and comments are welcome.
I would like to reiterate my willingness to do all the dirty work i.e.
porting device drivers and writing low level code for amd64 port, and
request anyone who may provide some leads to please do so.
Thank you.
Sanket
Andy Tanenbaum
masses of software is a good one. I can envision the core distribution
being one CD with other packages on the website.
I am definitely interested in a port to the AMD. A port to the PowerPC
is underway now as well as the ARM7.
The book schedule is now firming up. The release will be frozen Sept 2.
For this reason, heavy testing of 3.0.6 and bug reporting is much
appreciated. When 3.0.7 is available, I will post a notice here.
Andy Tanenbaum
Christos Karayiannis
like Minix-VMD? I mention the two characteristics still required by Minix to
be considered a full fledged Unix-like OS.
Christos
Hul Tytus
Andy Tanenbaum
release. Virtual memory is not currently on the agenda.
Andy Tanenbaum
Sanky
I'm glad to inform everyone that a port for AMD 64 Athlon is
underway!!!
Though it will take some time as I'm not that good at assembly, I think
its a good chance for me to improve my assembly!
I would also like to add support for virtual memory and demand paging
(thats the area I'm most interested in)..
I've been going through the Minix 2 source code for past few days and I
believe my envisioned change might just change the structure too much.
Any idea Sir about managing two different lines of minix?
Nick Bright
I would be happy to toss my XT into the testing fray if it's unknown at
this time.