Ask HN: Is Minix dead? No commits since 2018
Former MINIX3 contributor here, I&#x27;d like to share my perspective.<p>While others have noted that grant money has run out, for me MINIX3 is only as good as its weakest link: its microkernel has a really dated design. Imagine taking 1980s Unix and gutting it until you have a microkernel: it has a fork() primitive oddly enough, it&#x27;s not SMP-safe, it&#x27;s 32 bit only, processes only have one thread... It&#x27;s the one area of the OS that hasn&#x27;t changed that much since 1987.<p>So while there has been some very good research done on it (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.minix3.org&#x2F;doku.php?id=publications" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.minix3.org&#x2F;doku.php?id=publications</a>, especially of note reliability in face of drivers and services misbehaving or crashing as well as live update of almost all drivers and services without interruption of service), it cannot take advantage of modern 64 bit, multi-core processors.<p>Furthermore, the second weakest link is driver support. Running on bare metal is possible but vintage hardware is best suited for it because of the limited hardware support. Especially problematic is the lack of USB support on x86. NetBSD&#x27;s rumpkernel would have been a potential in-tree solution to fix this, but sadly it has never been done.<p>Anyways, these days the Zircon microkernel seems extremely promising. The design seems well thought-out, the object&#x2F;handle&#x2F;IPC mechanisms are especially interesting because it&#x27;s rather unlike everything else done at this point that I&#x27;m aware of and processes can only interact with the rest of the system through handles, so it&#x27;s trivial to sandbox things.<p>As for me on OS development, right now I&#x27;m having fun hacking on SerenityOS. It&#x27;s a sin for a micro-kernel guy like me, but who&#x27;s to say I can&#x27;t have a little bit of fun on the side?