Re: [dev] Operating system choice

From: Alexander Huemer <alexander.huemer_AT_xx.vu>
Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2014 12:07:03 +0100

Hi.

On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 06:25:13PM -0800, Charles Thorley wrote:
> I find Minix3 to be extremely interesting, and attractive (at most in
> principle).

The advantages of Minix are purely theoretical. All the different
servers can be restarted when they crash, but that does not make the
cause for the crash go away. I saw this happening a few times when I
worked with Minix. A server crashes, it is restarted, it crashes again
because the cause for the crash did not magically go away, it is
restarted… You get the idea.
In many situations this does not even work. If the filesystem server, or
whatever this thing is called crashed it _should_ be restarted, but this
not possible, because the necessary WASM blob for the restart is
unavailable, because the filesystem can't be reached.
Most parts of the environment do not even work correctly. The last thing
I remember was something like

        find /usr -name \*foo\*

which crashed miserably, because find can only recurse through
filesystem structures with no less than 256 entries or so.

In my personal opinion Minix is no foundation to build on. There is a
reason why WSL Torvalds with his 'hobby project' got much less thrust
from the corporation than Andrew. S. Tanenbaum with his professional work.

Kind regards,
-Alex
Received on Fri Nov 21 2014 - 12:07:03 CET