MINIX 3.2 Released With Some Major Changes

An anonymous reader writes "MINIX 3.2.0 was released today (alternative announcement). Lots of code has been pulled in from NetBSD, replacing libc, much of the userspace and the bootloader. This should allow much more software to be ported easily (using the pkgsrc infrastructure which was previously adopted) while retaining the microkernel architecture. Also Clang is now used as a default compiler and ELF as the default binary format, which should allow MINIX to be ported to other architectures in the near future (in fact, they are currently looking to hire someone with embedded systems experience to port MINIX to ARM). A live CD is available." The big highlight is the new NetBSD based userland — it replaces the incredibly old fashioned and limited Minix userland. There's even experimental SMP support. Topping it all off, the project switched over to git which would make getting involved in development a bit easier for the casual hacker.

Re:Minix

[Anonymous Coward]

Seconded. Aside from a purely nostalgic standpoint, not sure how relevant MINIX is in this day and age, given the hardware and OS choices available. Still, I guess people have the right to work on whatever the hell they want to.

Re:Neat

[canistel]

Wayland won't feature remote windowing. The best we can hope for is a pixel-scraper which dumps compressed bitmaps over the network.

You people need to get over your whole "x11 can run over the network" thing... I don't care what the theory is, nothing beats RDP (windows remote desktop) for running applications. I've used them all: rdp, vnc, ssh -X, nx... nothing comes close to rdp, and if you guys took of the "windows sucks" blinders you would admit that too. Whatever advantages Xorg might have, running appliations remotely is absolutely NOT one of them.

Re:Neat

[Cid Highwind]

Wayland won't feature remote windowing. The best we can hope for is a pixel-scraper which dumps compressed bitmaps over the network.

Which is what we've got now with Xorg + any non-trivial widget set, no?

Re:ARM port

[DrXym]

Yes. The uClibc C runtime ditches or makes optional a lot of stuff which is superfluous for embedding - locale stuff, math and so on and is optimized to save space, not necessarily performance and doesn't provide a stable ABI. Busybox doesn't offer a full implementation of various tools either, just the basics. Both are also modular so you're meant to pick what features you want or not at compile time. It's fine for embedding because space is usually at a premium, e.g. the rootfs has to sit in a small flash partition.

So you could use them on a desktop but the question is why in most cases since you would have the CPU and memory to support the fullblown libs. I doubt uClibc would compile against desktop style applications and most dists would expect full blown GNU tools to function. You'd probably have to roll your own dist for that.

Minix is cool

[spaceyhackerlady]

I respect Minix for its attempt at doing something different from the monolithic OSs we almost invariably use.

Linux and its ilk are very powerful, but they're not the only way to solve problems. Keep up the good work!

...laura

Re:Hurd

[manu0601]

On another note, I wonder why the Minix guys chose the NetBSD userland, since NetBSD is the least used BSD among the big 3

This is probably because NetBSD emphasis on portability often makes its code the cleanest one.