MINIX 3 developments

I haven't been very active in this newsgroup but I do thank those who
have been for keeping MINIX going. Some of the many people who have
helped tremendously in the past are Kees Bot, Philip Homburg, Al
Woodhull, Claudio Tantignone, Michael Temari, and, Giovanni Falzoni,
but there are more. My thanks to all of you.

My group is now working on a new and much improved MINIX 3. This is a
serious effort, with two experienced, professional programmers working
full time on it now, not to mention various students. The goal for the
first release is the end of October 2005. The main goals of MINIX 3
are to be small, reliable and secure. Numerous other improvements are in
the works including longer file names, bigger memories and disks, more
real-time friendly, better security, etc.

I would appreciate your not publicizing this now. It is far
better to wait until there is a solid product available for downloading.
Having a lot of people judging a pre-alpha release as the final product
will be very bad PR.

I see a serious 'market' for MINIX 3 in several areas, among them:

   1. Education, as has always been the case. The book is being updated.

   2. Low-end PCs. Various organizations are working on PCs that will
      sell for under $100 in India and China and will be powered by
      batteries recharged by a crank, solar cells, or other sources of
      power where there is no electricity.  An operating system for these
      limited computers must be small, resource efficient, and reliable.

   3. Embedded systems such as DVD players, digital cameras and camcorders,
      TV sets, cell phones, and the like often have an operating system
      with multiprogramming and a hierarchical file system. They often need
      to be highly modular. Some are real time.

   4, Companies who want a small (real-time) modular, open source operating
      system free of the GPL.  MINIX is and will continue to be released
      under the BSD license.

I am looking for volunteers to help out. Areas where help is wanted include:

   1. Porting software. A list of programs that we already have
      (or are working on) is given below. Other programs are welcome. See
      below for a few suggestions.

   2. Porting drivers. Examples are
         - disk drivers (IDE with DMA, S-ATA, SCSI)
         - Ethernet drivers other than RealTek and Intel Pro/100
         - USB and FireWire drivers, especially USB CD-ROMs
         - Printer drivers of all kinds
         - Audio drivers,
         - mouse drivers
         - etc., etc.

   3. Porting MINIX 3 to hardware platforms other than the Pentium. Some
      work is underway for the PowerPC and ARM7, but others are welcome.

   4. Porting new file systems. Since a file system is just a user program,
      multiple file systems can run at the same time. The Linux Ext3 file
      system is an obvious candidate. The CP/M file system would be fine
      for a digital camera.

   5. More and tougher test suites (POSIX and application programs).

   6. Testing MINIX 3 on various hardware configurations.

Other suggestions are welcome. Since we are now finalizing the OS itself
for the book, we are NOT looking for help the the OS itself right now.

A prototype for the new Website is at www.minix.net. This is about MINIX 2,
but shows you the new style. Comments are welcome.

We are also looking for a name and a logo. Current OSes have penguins,
longhorns, tigers, daemons, and whatnot as symbols. Maybe we need an
animate symbol too.  Something that suggests small, tough, reliable, might
be nice. I thought of the cockroach, but it got shot down internally because
although they are tough as nails and have survived 300 million years, they
are still bugs. And they are not cute. Maybe a female 'mailman' instead?

Comments to me and thanks for braving this long period of inactivity.

Andy Tanenbaum (ast-FV+mU1CFjts@public.gmane.org)

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Here are the programs we already have or are working on:

Makefile   comm       finger     isoread    nice       rm         termcap
aal        compress   flex       join       nl         rmdir      test
add_route  copy       fmt        kermit     nm         roff       tget
advent     cp         fold       kill       nohup      rsh        time
ascii      crc        fortune    last       nonamed    scripts    touch
ash        cron       fsck       lbracket   od         sed        tr
at         csplit     fsck1      leave      passwd     seq        traverse
atrun      cut        ftp        life       paste      setuidgid  treecmp
autil      date       ftpd       link       patch      sh         true
awk        dd         gather     ln         pathchk    sha1sum    tsort
backup     de         gcc        login      perl       shar       ttt
badblocks  decomp16   getty      logname    pine       shred      tty
banner     df         gomoku     look       ping       simple     umount
basename   dhrystone  grep       lp         pinky      size       uname
bash       diff       groff      lpd        pr         sleep      unexpand
bc         dircolors  gunzip     ls         pr_routes  sort       uniq
bison      dirname    gzip       m4         prep       split      unlink
btoa       dis88      head       mail       pretty     stat       unshar
byacc      diskcheck  host       make       printenv   strings    update
cal        diskusage  hostaddr   man        printf     strip      uptime
calendar   du         hostid     md5        printroot  stty       users
cat        dw         hostname   md5sum     proto      su         uud
cawf       echo       i386       men        ptx        sum        uue
cd         ed         i86        mesg       pwd        swapfs     vol
cdiff      eject      ibm        mined      pwdauth    sync       wc
cgrep      elle       ic         mkdir      rarpd      synctree   whatsnew
chgrp      elvis      id         mkfifo     rcp        tac        which
chmem      emacs      ifconfig   mkfs       readall    tail       who
chmod      env        ifdef      mknod      readfs     talk       whoami
chown      expand     in.fingerd mkproto    readlink   talkd      width
chroot     expr       in.rld     modem      reboot     tar        write
ci         factor     in.rshd    mount      recover    tcpd       xargs
cksum      false      indent     mref       remove     tee        X11
clr        fgrep      inodes     mt         remsync    telnet     yap
cmp        file       install    mv         rev        telnetd    yes
co         find       irdpd      ncheck     rlogin     term       zmodem

Some programs for which we don't have any version or only an old version are
listed below. Some require X11, which we don't have yet, so these should
probably wait until X11 is ported. These are only examples.  Anything
useful is welcome. Here is the list:

antiword, arpwatch, autoconf, automake, baselayout, bind, bittorrent, bochs,
bzip2, calc, cdrecord, chat, chimera, cpio, debuggers, diffutils, expr,
firewall (e.g., openBSD's pf), flex, gawk, gdb, valgrind, gmake, gnupg, gpm,
gv, httpd, inews, ispell, joe, jpeg, jpg, languages (LISP, Prolog, TCL, ...),
leafnode, less, lmbench, lrzsz, lynx2, mgetty, mh, modutils, mp3 player,
mpegaudio, mtools, mush, mutt, ncftp, ncurses, netpbm, nmh, nntpclnt, ntp,
nvi, openssh (ssh, scp, etc.), partition manager, popper, procmail, procps
(free, pgrep, pkill, pmap, pwdx, skill, slabtop, snice, tload, top), psmisc
(fuser, killall, pstree), python, qpopper, rcs, readline, rsync, samba,
screen, shadow, smail, smake, sox, subversion, sudo, syslogd, talk, tcpdump,
tex, timezone, top, traceroute, transfig, trn, tzcode, unzip, vi, nvi, vim,
vmail, vtwm, wget, wusage, xcdplayer, xearth, xfig, xli, xli, xmodem, xpaint,
xv, zcrypt, zip, zsh and other shells,

Major libraries (e.g., zlib, pthreads, libpcap, libpng) are also welcome
Test suites are very welcome, including tests of TCP (synfloods, bad packets),
POSIX tests, and stress tests that push the system very hard.