On Tue, 24 May 2011 13:12:39 +0200, Anselm R Garbe wrote:
I don't understand why so few people on this list are interested in
Minix3. ~5k LOC for a POSIX-compatible kernel that can run most of
the software you need on a Unix box sounds nice to me.
I'm secretly very fond of Minix. I remember getting a negative
reaction to it from the Plan 9 folks so I've not bothered to bring
it
up since. But a tiny POSIX microkernel? Win. I've read a bunch of
Tanenbaum's books, too...
Only problem is hardware support. Ain't that always the way?
If you want to go that route, I suggest to build the hardware
yourself
as well, here is a brilliant guy who did it a couple of years ago:
http://www.homebrewcpu.com/
Looks cool. I'm not courageous enough to try though. I have written a
few FPGAs with VHDL/Xilinx but that's as far as my knowledge of
numerical electronics go so the limit of my "big picture understanding"
is that I have some layer that can execute a reduced instructions set
(eg. x86).
As for the hardware to run Minix3, I am lucky to have an old Dell
laptop with one of the few supported ethernet chipsets, but otherwise
emulation (with QEMU) works fine, with sufficient performance if your
CPU has VT-x capabilities.
I haven't had much time to play with it recently. I was disappointed
by the move towards GNU tools (glibc, gcc) but I have to admit that
ack is old and lagging behind modern compilers.
I wonder how hard it would be to build a "suckless" Minix3
distribution with tcc / musl...
--
Pierre 'catwell' Chapuis
