

Continued Funding for Minix (2.5M Euro) - mahmud
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/137015

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anigbrowl
I was going to be snooty about this, but on reflection the existence of Minix
is a good thing for mission-critical applications like medical, military or
scientific computing (eg satellites). Likely, the performance advantages of
Linux's monolithic kernel have been obviated by the advances in hardware
performance over the years.

The maintainers don't sell themselves very well though. It does give off the
flavor of ivory tower academia despite the apparent concrete benefits.
Tannenbaum's public comments that he doesn't know who is using Minix (and by
implication, doesn't care) isn't a very good advert for it.

Do HN readers think there's a demand for apparently-bulletproof *nix, or are
other OS offerings already good enough for anything that isn't classified?

~~~
davidw
Is Minix actually used for embedded stuff like that? I thought it was mostly
used for teaching OS stuff.

It _does_ have very clear, easy to read code. I once needed a floppy driver
for the eCos operating system, and Minix's was way easier to read than Linux &
the BSDs', probably because it doesn't try and do everything for everyone.

~~~
anigbrowl
I don't know. It just seems like it would be a natural candidate if the claims
about the size and fault-tolerance of the kernel are true (as opposed to
reinventing the wheel and writing everything from scratch).

