Minix 3.3 Released With Cortex-A8 ARM Support, NetBSD Userland Compatibility

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 16 September 2014 at 10:40 AM EDT. 8 Comments
OPERATING SYSTEMS
Andrew Tanenbaum and his crew have released a significant update to Minix. The Minix 3.3.0 release comes with x86 and ARM support, is mostly compatible with the NetBSD user-land while its kernel is less than 13k lines of code, and it's BSD-licensed.

The Minix 3.3.0 micro-kernel comes in at 12,700 lines of code and it handles interrupts and message passing, with that being the only kernel-mode code on the system. Each hardware driver is run as a separate and isolaed user-mode process with self-healing capabilities for restarting drivers that crash. Minix OS is still considered a research operating system through this process.

Meanwhile when it comes to the userland code, it's largely compatible with NetBSD and its thousands of NetBSD packages. Minix 3.3.0 is also supported by both the LLVM Clang and GCC compilers and has other popular software components running on it. Minix 3.3.0 has been tested on x86 and ARM Cortex-A8 architectures. Ports of Minix on ARM are now available for the BeagleBoard/BeagleBone family including the XM, white, and black versions.


Many more details on today's Minix 3.3 release can be found via Minix3.org.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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