Minix 3: An OS that doesn't suck -- too much.

Cees De Groot cdegroot at gmail.com
Fri May 19 06:42:53 UTC 2006


On 5/19/06, Alan Grimes <agrimes at speakeasy.net> wrote:
> The real API provides a tiny handful of services for interprocess
> communication. These can be wrapped in an almost laughably trivial
> manner by appropriate plugin code and a few lines of assembler. These
> services provide functionality that I have never seen on any other OS.

Don't start about IPC and well-designed operating systems or I'll
start about VMS...

But - you're right in concluding that Minix is probably much better
architected than the stuff that is currently mainstream. It has been
carefully guided to that state by it's father (Andrew Tanenbaum) for
probably two decades...

> I have been tinkering with the idea of testing my own OS ideas
> on top of Minix using precicely these calls. =)
>
And that's just what Minix is meant to do - support OS research.
Still, quite a feat that by now they're running X and stuff...



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list