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Alternative OS of the Month: April 2007

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How can you mention Minix without mentioning Andrew S. Tanenbaum? :)

http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/

I'm sure many of us used his "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation" textbook in at least one CS class. He's now mainyl into distributed computing research, I believe:

Amoeba: http://www.cs.vu.nl/pub/amoeba/amoeba.html

Globe: http://www.cs.vu.nl/globe/

And don't forget that Minix predates Linux. I believe that there's still no love lost between AST and Linus.
 
the wikipedia article I linked to talks about all of that.
 
Yeah, but I added it to the thread. +1 redundancy points for me. :)

Is minix used in a production environment at all? Or is it strictly an educational OS? It seems ideal for embedded systems.
 
Last edited:
Ah yes, who could forget this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum-Torvalds_debate
"Linux is obsolete" :p

I think Minix is mostly used in academic circles, I imagine a lot of people see it in Operating Systems classes (along with Tanenbaums's textbook, I have one even though we used Pintos in our class).

I don't know of any places where it is actually used commercially. I find it interesting that they mention embedded systems as a potential usage, but make no mention of real-time performance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time), which is crucial to most embedded systems. As far as I can tell they don't do anything to really enable real-time performance, which would make it a poor choice for most embedded systems. Of course it is open source, so someone could make it real time posix compliant if they wanted to.

3D Performance would likely suffer beyond that of Win32 or even Linux (if Linux didn't have **** drivers for video cards) because the video driver would be running outside the kernel in userspace, is easily preempted for CPU time, and would communicate with other processes using message passing (which has its own overhead).
 
Yea, his optimism regarding GNU Hurd and Sparc architectures is amusing as well looking back.

But hindsight is 20/20.
 
funnyperson1 said:
3D Performance would likely suffer beyond that of Win32 or even Linux (if Linux didn't have **** drivers for video cards) because the video driver would be running outside the kernel in userspace, is easily preempted for CPU time, and would communicate with other processes using message passing (which has its own overhead).
Click to expand...

Ah ha! Excellent explanation. This is what some naysayers maintained, in regard to XSOS 3.0, whose author claims to be using an L4 microkernel.
 
Mind you the overhead shouldn't be that great our computers might be fast enough that the performance difference won't matter as much. Provided with decent drivers the XSOS project could certainly provide a decent alternative for gaming.

Actually Vista has moved a great deal of the graphics driver code out of the kernel and into userspace.

From http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480220.aspx :

At a technical level, WDDM display drivers have two components, a kernel mode driver (KMD) that is very streamlined, and a user-mode driver that does most of the intense computations. With this model, most of the code is moved out of kernel mode. That is, the kernel mode piece is now solely responsible for lower-level functionality and the user mode piece takes on heavier functionality such as facilitating the translation from higher-level API constructs to direct GPU commands while maintaining application compatibility. This greatly reduces the chance of a fatal blue screen and most graphics driver-related problems result in at worst one application being affected.

WDDM also provides fault-tolerance against display driver hangs. This enables Windows Vista to detect system hangs and restart the display driver again without the need of a system reboot.
Click to expand...

I have actually experienced this with buggy nvidia drivers, Vista just reloaded the drivers and kept chugging (although the next series of nv drivers I tried bsodd on me).
 
This may partially explain the poor gaming performance in comparison to XP, which I have experienced firsthand. FPS in Vista are typically lower for me.
 
has anyone run across some "lesson plans" for minix3? Some type of beginner documentation that is more than the standard "minix installation guide"? I jsut read through a description of AST's book, and I thought it would be a little over my head, not to mention the price of it. I'm looking for something more elementary, I think.
 
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