Download Minix 3.1.1

Andrew Tanenbaum has announced the launch of Minix 3. This operating system served as inspiration for the development of Linux and is mainly focused on stability and security. Minix 1 and 2 were mainly intended as study material, but with version 3 Tanenbaum wants to offer an operating system for production environments where the use of resources must be kept to a minimum and reliability is important. For example, with regard to security, it is emphasized that fewer than four thousand lines of code run in kernel mode. All drivers and applications work in user mode. As a result, a driver crash normally cannot cause the entire system to shut down, but simply restarts the driver and does not affect any other running programs. Since the previous major stable release dates back to 1996, when Minix 2.0 was launched, a changelog would be too extensive. The main improvements compared to version 2 can be read below:

New Features

• Installation (based on a live CD) is much simpler
• Memory sizes up to 4 GB are supported
• Disk blocks can be 1-, 2-, 4-, or 8-KB
• The select system call has been added
• Many new programs including gcc, emacs, nvi, vim, bison, python, perl, GNU utilities
• An information server has been added for debugging and other purposes
• A reincarnation server automatically kills and replaces faulty device drivers on the fly

Better System structure

• The kernel has been heavily rewritten, cleaned up, and reduced to under 4000 lines of code
• Each device driver (except the clock) is now a separate user process
• Many new reliability features have been added
• A new nonblocking notification mechanism for IPC has been added
• Timer management has been improved and simplified
• Scheduling has been made more general
• A bit map controls which destinations a process can send to
• A bit map controls which kernel calls drivers and servers can make
• Control of ‘superuser-like’ powers for kernel calls have been modularized
• Interrupt notification and messages have been integrated

[break]Images for USB sticks, USB CD-ROMs and a bootable floppy disk can here be downloaded.