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:Neat

[laffer1]

http://wayland.freedesktop.org/ [freedesktop.org]

Re:ARM port

[LizardKing]

ARM Linux is much smaller

The Linux kernel itself usually isn't. The C libraries that come with the distributions ARM board vendors often bundle with their hardware are typically smaller as they don't usually use glibc (or a derivative of it).

Re:ARM port

[DrXym]

Embedded dists tend to use uClibc + BusyBox. Android uses a BSD user-land with a C runtime implementing a subset of Posix called BIONIC. The kernel would be compiled down to strip out superfluous drivers, filesystems, subsystems and so on.