On 22 February 2016 at 15:39, Toby Thain <t...@telegraphics.com.au> wrote: > So has Minix 3 - last I checked, x86 & ARM only - what's the point of that.
Oh, come on. Be fair. First, it's a student project without a huge amount of visibility in the outside world. Secondly, those are *the* two main computing platforms in the world today, amounting to sales of *billions* of processors every year. I suspect that every other general-purpose processor arch put together amounts to a rounding error compared to ARM+x86. It's not NetBSD. They're comparing it to NetBSD for what you could call marketing purposes, but it's not a fork or derivative or anything else. It's a whole new kernel to which they are porting the NetBSD userland, as it's a good, clean, solid, FOSS offering. If you want a simple low-end very portable Unix, there is still NetBSD itself. Minix 3 is not just another FOSS Unix. It is trying to become something very very different, something that has never been successfully done in the FOSS world: a true microkernel Unix-like OS. Not like the Xnu kernel of MacOS X: that is based on Mach 3.0, but it is a large monolithic kernel containing a single huge in-kernel "Unix server" derived from FreeBSD. Unlike the GNU HURD, Minix 3 is relatively complete and functional -- and it's got there in under a decade. It's not a new version of Minix 1 or 2 -- it's a totally new kernel. The *only* OS in the world remotely comparable to Minix 3 is QNX, which is not FOSS. Minix 3 is built from a number of cooperating user-space processes -- servers -- which can die and be respawned while the OS is running. Yes, including the filesystem, network stack etc. They even have tech demos of this allowing for in-place complete version upgrades of the running OS, *without reboots.* Minix 3 is the single most technically impressive new Unix-like OS that I have seen or heard of in the entire FOSS world in this century. It deserves more respect than "what's the point of that". -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)
