What does HackerNews think of minix?

The pull requests list is better than the issues list.

This non-bug asks for a video on how to use OpenSSH:

* https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...

This one was fixed in 2017:

* https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...

This non-bug asks for where to start when learning:

* https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...

I've gone through quite a few of these at random, for this and another comment on this page, and this one is the first one that is even close to an outstanding bug, and it's only open because the pull request that fixed the problem back in 2020 hasn't been merged yet.

* https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...

That's pretty poor analysis. The existence of an issues list on GitHub doesn't automatically mean that the issues are valid, and the 2nd random one that I picked was someone complaining that fetching a package with FTP didn't work when the network was down. In 2021.

* https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...

Then this one turned out to be a chat request.

* https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...

And this one the author actually asked to be closed, because the problem is fixed. It's still open.

* https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...

If those are any indication, this is an issues list where no-one gets rid of the rubbish, and it thus its existence alone tells one nothing at all, as one probably is going to have to weed a whole bunch of very clearly non-bugs out to determine if there's anything left.

The original is forever frozen in time as a memorial to Terry’s genius, but there is an (at least somewhat) actively maintained fork, which has added features of which Terry himself would not have approved - https://github.com/Zeal-Operating-System/ZealOS is the main one, which was last updated only a couple of months ago; by contrast, Minix’s last commit appears to have been in 2018 - https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix

But maybe that’s the answer for MINIX too - maybe one of the people who have authored all those unreviewed PRs might start a community-based fork. If all the activity moves to the fork, there is a chance the originators might officially bless it

> Be the change you want to see in the world.

I have made dozens of commits to MINIX3, including a brand-new ISO 9660 file system implementation (https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...).

I have made more than a hundred commits to SerenityOS (https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/commits?author=boricj).

Just because I deplore the general state of security in mainstream operating systems doesn't mean that I demand that someone else does something about it for free.

I'm not paid to fix security bugs in the Linux kernel, do you expect me to fix these myself for free just because you want to? No one is entitled to my own free time spent hacking on random stuff.

dash is an Almquist shell. At this point there are several major ones (the Debian one, the FreeBSD one, the NetBSD one, and the BusyBox one) and a whole raft of minor ones (Minix, Cygwin, Android, et al.).

* https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/ash/

And Wikipedia does not say that. It says that the Minix Almquist shell, specifically, had a non-conformant test utility. The Almquist shell did not, after all, have a built-in test command at all to start with, so the standard conformance of that utility wasn't a matter for the Almquist shell.

Once again Wikipedia is wrong, because Thomas Dickey's original page that purportedly supports this claim points out that the Minix test command was an external command and not part of the Almquist shell. M. Dickey even pointed to the source code for the external command on GitHub.

* https://invisible-island.net/autoconf/portability-test.html#...

* https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...

* https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Don't%20abbreviate%2...

Yes, xv6 is great. The original post here already has a brief section on the code from xv6/pipe.c, which made for pleasant reading after I had just finished working my way through the 6E code.

I also looked at the pipe implementation in Minix, which is a (non-trivial) variant of John S. Dyson's implementation that the BSDs share. It is implemented as a server (in the microkernel sense), so there's quite some added complexity there in handling "vmount"s and locking, but there are still some familiar elements of the code too, such as the "put it all together with flags" code in create_pipe().

https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...

For something even further along these lines, there's also the pipe implementation from Plan9, which at first glance felt so unfamiliar that I wasn't sure I was looking in the right place:

https://9p.io/sources/plan9/sys/src/9/port/devpipe.c

See https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...

It "only" delayed Minix 3.4 for 2 years.

The Minix 3 license contains [0]:

    * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
    documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

So it looks like Minix's license does require the copyright/license to be included in distributions.

[0]: https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...

Some do, some don't.

The BSD licence that MINIX 3 uses actually requires giving credit:

Copyright (c) 1987, 1997, 2006, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands All rights reserved. Redistribution and use of the MINIX 3 operating system in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

[...]

Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

[...]

Source: https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...