DOS ain't dead

Minix (Miscellaneous)

posted by Rugxulo , Usono, 05.03.2020, 00:12

> > Historically, it's tied to Minix,
>
> I considered porting FPC to Minix somewhere in the 2003-2006 period.
> Probably during the Minux2->Minix3 transition. But my life changed from
> academia to daily work in that period, so in the end I never did.

Minix 3 started in 2005. Apparently the book is stuck to 3.1.0 (old version) while latest snapshot from 2017 is 3.4.0rc6.

A lot has changed over the years, but I've not really properly used it, so I could be wrong on details. (At one time, I couldn't get it working under VBox, but that was many years ago.) Proper X11 support, can save FPU/SIMD context across tasks, ELF (instead of a.out), shared libraries (no more segmentation hacks), but it's still 32-bit only (on x86, there are other unfinished?? ports) and no USB support. But it does use Clang and NetBSD userland.

They had major funding for a few years (2009-14?), but I guess that ran out. I had thought that main selling point was the self-healing drivers in the microkernel. I don't know if that attracted a lot of developers. Perhaps Linux is too entrenched (or popular or robust or easy or whatever).

> > Too old and limited for most people,
>
> in that time, they had some limitations to force you to spend
> a certain amount of monetary resources
>
> So I had a large motivational problem.

That's long not been a problem (since 2000), even older versions were relicensed. Minix 2 (DOSMinix) was small enough that I almost consider it a quick way to multitask with portable development tools and then go back to DOS to build a final release. (I think they even half recommended pcemu under Minix 2 back then, but I remember ACK's cpp had a problem with it. Minix 2 even chokes on too much RAM and required some boot monitor setting to avoid that. But you can probably at least run Bochs nowadays under Minix 3, who knows.) DOSMinix was not quite the same as old UMSDOS (Linux 2.4 series) like in Slackware 11.0 (ZipSlack from 2006), but I guess vaguely comparable. (Hey, both are more practical to run these days than early '90s proprietary Windows 3.x, obviously.)

I snipped all pointless and redundant replies about optimism, portability, etc. You already know the obvious answers, so I feel like I'm preaching to the choir here. What a messy world.

Complete thread:

• modern 64-bit cpus - Rugxulo, 21.02.2020, 11:40 (Miscellaneous)
  • modern 64-bit cpus - marcov, 22.02.2020, 19:31
    • modern 64-bit cpus - Rugxulo, 23.02.2020, 02:10
      • modern 64-bit cpus - marcov, 23.02.2020, 17:24
        • modern 64-bit cpus - Rugxulo, 24.02.2020, 00:11
          • modern 64-bit cpus - marcov, 24.02.2020, 21:59
            • modern 64-bit cpus - Rugxulo, 26.02.2020, 03:54
              • modern 64-bit cpus - marcov, 26.02.2020, 18:11
                • modern 64-bit cpus - Rugxulo, 27.02.2020, 12:13
                  • modern 64-bit cpus - marcov, 27.02.2020, 21:44
                    • programming language comparison - Rugxulo, 01.03.2020, 11:55
                      • programming language comparison - marcov, 03.03.2020, 11:46
                        • programming language comparison - Rugxulo, 03.03.2020, 23:02
                          • programming language comparison - marcov, 04.03.2020, 11:02
                            • Minix - Rugxulo, 05.03.2020, 00:12
                • nested procedures - Rugxulo, 03.03.2020, 06:05
                  • nested procedures - marcov, 03.03.2020, 10:16
                    • nested procedures - Rugxulo, 03.03.2020, 22:19
                      • nested procedures - marcov, 08.03.2020, 23:08
                        • ultra-modern x86_64 cpus - Rugxulo, 31.03.2020, 20:29
                          • ultra-modern x86_64 cpus - marcov, 17.04.2020, 12:02
              • modern 64-bit cpus - RayeR, 27.02.2020, 05:41