What are your impression on minix, netbsd,openbsd ?

I haven't tried MINIX because it's 32-bit only.

NetBSD is nice. It has some issues with UEFI and in a Dell laptop the keyboard doesn't work, so I have to attach a USB keyboard or connect via SSH. It has some technologies that would be nice to have in FreeBSD, but in other areas it's behind FreeBSD by a few years. What's critically missing for me is ZFS on root done by the installer, as the instructions in the web can't be followed.

I also installed OpenBSD but I can't say I love it. Not only they don't plan to support ZFS at all but also there's no TRIM support for SSD, so I'll do it from FreeBSD by mounting its partition. OpenBSD is the only BSD that has WiFi drivers for my Raspberry Pi 4b though.

I tried to install Illumos (OpenIndiana or OmniOS CE) but it fails to read the GPT partitioned disk with a 512M EFI partition. (This is hopefully fixes in this commit, so I'm waiting for them to roll new installation media). I even bought an external DVD-RW for this because the ISO doesn't seem to work at all from an USB flash drive. I run OpenIndiana, OmniOS & SmartOS on QEMU VM's.
 
In case you have an intel CPU, you are running Minix. It is the thing running their secure area, and I think the bootstrap for the whole chip.
 
Minix3 is an interesting OS for fault tolerance. Killing the TCP stack every few milliseconds and seeing FTP going just a wee bit slower is impressive.
 
Is Minix at the point where you could run a small server on it (with say a xAMP stack)? How about a desktop with a common DE?

When I interacted with it (early 90s), it was purely a teaching tool, but a really nice one. And I've never gone back and tracked its progress.
 
minix3 is quite different from the original minix. From https://wiki.minix3.org/doku.php?id=www:download:releasenotes-3.3.0
In 2008, the European Research Council awarded Prof. Andrew S. Tanenbaum, the designer of MINIX, an Advanced Grant of €2.5 million (about $3.2 million) to produce a reliable operating system.
...
MINIX 1 was originally a system aimed at teaching operating systems but after the ERC grant, the focus changed to include producing a solid, commercially viable product as well. The new version, MINIX 3.3.0, has a number of key features:

  • The system is based on a tiny (12,700 lines of code) microkernel
  • The microkernel handles interrupts and message passing and is the only code running in kernel mode.
  • The rest of the operating system runs as a collection of isolated, protected, user-mode processes
  • Each device driver is a separate user-mode process isolated by the MMU hardware
  • If a driver crashes, the system automatically restarts it, with running applications not even noticing
  • This means that MINIX 3.3.0 is self-healing
  • Userland is largely compatible with NetBSD and runs thousands of NetBSD packages
  • By combining an innovative self-healing research OS with NetBSD userland, we got the best of both worlds
  • Both the clang/LLVM and gcc compilers are available, as well as perl, python, etc.
  • MINIX 3.3.0 is available for both the x86 and ARM Cortex A8 architectures, making it ideal for embedded systems
  • Tools for cross compiling MINIX 3 for the ARM on Linux are provided
  • Ports are available now for the BeagleBoard XM, BeagleBone white, and BeagleBone black
  • Extensive documentation is available in the MINIX 3 wiki
  • The code has been improved over MINIX 3.2.1 in hundreds of ways, leading to a cleaner and more reliable system
  • Other features are listed here.
Click to expand...
You can download from https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix
 
rbranco said:
I haven't tried MINIX because it's 32-bit only.

NetBSD is nice. It has some issues with UEFI and in a Dell laptop the keyboard doesn't work, so I have to attach a USB keyboard or connect via SSH. It has some technologies that would be nice to have in FreeBSD, but in other areas it's behind FreeBSD by a few years. What's critically missing for me is ZFS on root done by the installer, as the instructions in the web can't be followed.

I also installed OpenBSD but I can't say I love it. Not only they don't plan to support ZFS at all but also there's no TRIM support for SSD, so I'll do it from FreeBSD by mounting its partition. OpenBSD is the only BSD that has WiFi drivers for my Raspberry Pi 4b though.

I tried to install Illumos (OpenIndiana or OmniOS CE) but it fails to read the GPT partitioned disk with a 512M EFI partition. (This is hopefully fixes in this commit, so I'm waiting for them to roll new installation media). I even bought an external DVD-RW for this because the ISO doesn't seem to work at all from an USB flash drive. I run OpenIndiana, OmniOS & SmartOS on QEMU VM's.
Click to expand...
Openindia is almost dead. Like Solaris but no devs.
 
i installed openbsd on a macbook 9 years ago

the installer was easy to use
i installed xfce, firefox vlc no problem

the pf firewall was really nice

i cant remember what the desktop performance was like for playing youtube videos with firefox
 
Minix is really an academic teaching tool, you need Andrew Tanenbaum's book https://www.amazon.co.uk/Operating-Systems-Design-Implementation-MINIX/dp/8120329554 to go with it. I think some people do use it in anger on small systems, but the selection of available software and drivers is likely to be rather limited. I've always thought of it chiefly as a learning/teaching tool.

Openbsd and netbsd both installed on my older thinkpads (X61 was the last thing I ran those on) and I was able to set up X11 desktops on both using basic window managers. However both tend to have a more limited driver support and software selection when compared to freebsd, and both have smaller user bases than freebsd.

Openbsd is the home of pf and ssh of course, and while it can be used as a desktop I think openbsd is most widely used to build network appliances like firewalls and NAS. Their main claim to fame is an audited code base that is supposed to be free of security bugs; security is their focus. They also have release songs: https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html . :)

Netbsd is the highly-portable version which claims to run on almost any hardware you can name, they support a vast range of target machines; their focus is portability. If you've got an old rs6k or dec alpha lying around, your best chance of finding an o/s to run on it is netbsd. They also support a lot of modern sbc's. There is a list of supported architectures here: https://www.netbsd.org/ports/ .
 
iRobbery said:
was busy yesterday with 9front/plan9 on bhyve

9FRONT "DO NOT INSTALL" RELEASED

9front.org 9front.org

unsure what opinion to form on it yet, but I'm not really writing enthusiastic things instantly. It's a bit strange.
Click to expand...
I think plan9 is really a research o/s, from the same team that brought you unix at bell labs, where they explore new ideas in operating system design. Given the source that it comes from, it's definitely worth a look.
 
Alain De Vos said:
I cant use any of them because of nvidia card. And lack of drivers.
But have they have use cases ?
Click to expand...
They're good for trying on Raspberry Pi and other ARM SBC's.

I was thinking of never having the need for trying Minix3 again, until I realized that, I can try it on Raspberry Pi. It doesn't have activity and lacks drivers. But I've tried it once on a regular computer with a basic install, and it was pretty cool, though it had limited ability, with mostly a command line and limited programs. It was fast. I didn't install pkgsrc on it though. That was a very long time ago. Edit: The available images for Minix3 work on Beagleboard, which uses ARM architecture. Using on Raspberry requires cross compiling, which it has instructions to. Playing with Minix3 on an SBC, no matter how limited, would have been cool though.

NetBSD and Fugu-Ita (of OpenBSD) also have images for ARM architecture. I haven't tried NetBSD on my Raspberry yet, but I intend to.


I wondered about trying RedoxOS on a Raspberry Pi. It may have to be built from source code to try that, which is too much for me.
 
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blackbird9 said:
Minix is really an academic teaching tool, you need Andrew Tanenbaum's book https://www.amazon.co.uk/Operating-Systems-Design-Implementation-MINIX/dp/8120329554 to go with it. I think some people do use it in anger on small systems, but the selection of available software and drivers is likely to be rather limited. I've always thought of it chiefly as a learning/teaching tool.
Click to expand...
But apparently it is also the basis for Intel's Management Engine in some of their server CPUs:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-operating-system/
According to the article, it uses a closed-source version of the open-source Minix3 (it has a BSD 3-clause license).
 
rbranco said:
I wouldn't say dead since I'm tracking the git repo and they're fixing and adding stuff. There are also commercial products based on it.

I'm trying to build my own ISO for OmniOS.

OTOH, DragonflyBSD doesn't have much movement.
Click to expand...
I hope it says around long enough for me to try it. I have always thought it would be interesting to try, because it comes from the System V side of the Unix family tree.

Back in the late-'80s/early-'90s, I was working on getting some mainframe security software certified by the then National Computer Security Center which, interestingly, was the only public-facing part of the National Security Agency. One of our competitors was System V/MLS (https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA234055.pdf, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6770686). At the time, I knew nothing about Unix, and Linux hadn't been written yet. Now that I know a little about FreeBSD, it would be interesting to see how Solaris differs from FreeBSD. Usually, whenever I think of installing OpenIndiana, I don't have a spare machine. (I hate dual-booting, because it seems like I always need something that is on the other OS.) Luckily, I have three computers in my closet that do not quite work. If I can get at least one of them working again, I can set up an OpenIndiana machine to play with, as long as it doesn't fade away before I get a chance.
 
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