What's cool about Minix, and where it should be aimed

Posted Feb 8, 2007 8:08 UTC (Thu) by davidw (guest, #947)
Parent article: Comparing Linux and Minix

It's pretty obvious that going head to head with an industrial operating system that has had, at this point, millions of dollars of smart people's time sunk into making it better is a losing proposition for a small system like Minix. There's no way it can compete there.

What is cool about Minix is what it was originally designed for - to let you work on a real, live OS that is still comprehensible even if it's not your job to follow its development. Several years ago I wrote an article about eCos for a magazine, and needed a floppy driver to enhance the system I was creating. I looked at the Linux and BSD drivers, and they were way to convoluted and tied into the rest of their kernels. Then I found the Minix floppy driver, which was simply, clean, and very easy to port to eCos.

Perhaps Minix will find itself a nice niche in some area of embedded systems or some other field where a system is written to do one or two things for years at a time, and being able to hack the kernel is an advantage.

What's cool about Minix, and where it should be aimed

Posted Feb 8, 2007 16:36 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Yeah, well, Linux's floppy.c is especially crusty by the standards of Linux drivers (a classic case of ancient stuff getting things added on over time and never getting a good cleanup: it's nice to see people considering that now).

What's cool about Minix, and where it should be aimed

Posted Feb 8, 2007 16:48 UTC (Thu) by davidw (guest, #947) [Link] (1 responses)

I'll take your word for it. It should also be said that the Linux driver has code for what seems like a zillion different types of floppies, something that I didn't need.

That said, though, the Minix code was very clean and easy to understand, and I would highly recommend it for those learning...

In fact floppy.c is a very current topic on linux-kernel

Posted Feb 9, 2007 12:19 UTC (Fri) by dododge (guest, #2870) [Link]

In late January the need for a rewrite of floppy.c popped up in the middle of a driver maintenance discussion. Apparently it is indeed notoriously awful, with folks like Greg K-H jokingly calling the existing code a "tar-pit of despair".

Jesper Juhl has taken on the challenge, and posted the first five patches (mostly cleanups and prep work) on Monday.