[GRLUG] Tanenbaum in Ann Arbor

[Ben Rousch]

Just in case any of you are interested ...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dug Song <dugsong at monkey.org>
Date: Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 11:26 AM
Subject: [a2geeks] Fwd: andrew tanenbaum speaking wednesday
To: a2geeks <a2geeks at googlegroups.com>


Wow, MINIX still going!

Curious to see what new direction they've taken it in (how is this
different than exokernels)? Linux did prevail after all (e.g.
http://www.dina.dk/~abraham/Linus_vs_Tanenbaum.html ), and it seems
there are only microkernel vestiges left in Windows or MacOS X.

This should be a good one. Please fwd it to any systems folks you know!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: peter honeyman <honey at citi.umich.edu>
Date: Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 11:08 AM
Subject: andrew tanenbaum speaking wednesday
To: thebackrow at citi.umich.edu
Cc: Greg Minshall <minshall at umich.edu>


TITLE: MINIX3: A Reliable and Secure Operating System

BY: Andrew Tanenbaum, Vrije Universiteit

WHERE: Wednesday Jan 5, 4:30-5:30, 1690 CSE

ABSTRACT:
Most computer users nowadays are nontechnical people and have a
mental model of what they expect from a computer based on their
experience with TV sets and stereos: you buy it, plug it in, and
it works perfectly for the next 10 years. Unfortunately, they are
often disappointed as computers are not very reliable when
measured against the standards of other consumer electronics
devices.

A large part of the problem is the operating system, which is
often millions of lines of kernel code, each of which can
potentially bring the system down. The worst offenders are the
device drivers, which have been shown to have bug rates 3-7x more
than the rest of the system. As long as we maintain the current
structure of the operating system as a huge single monolithic
program full of foreign code and running in kernel mode, the
situation will only get worse. While there have been ad hoc
attempts to patch legacy systems, what is needed is a different
approach.

In an attempt to provide much higher reliability, we have created
a new multiserver operating system with only 5000 lines in kernel
and the rest of the operating system split up into small
components each running as a separate user-mode process. For
example, each device driver runs as a separate process and is
rigidly controlled by the kernel to give it the absolute minimum
amount of power to prevent bugs in it from damaging other system
components. A reincarnation server periodically tests each user-
mode component and automatically replaces failed or failing
components on the fly, without bringing the system down and in
some cases without affecting user processes. The talk will
discuss the architecture of this system, called MINIX 3.

The system can be downloaded for free from www.minix3.org.

BIO:
Andrew Stuart "Andy" Tanenbaum is a member of the faculty of the
Department of Computer Systems, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, in
the Netherlands. He is best known as the author of Minix, a free
UNIX operating system, and for his computer science textbooks. He
was born in New York City and raised in White Plains, NY. He
received his undergraduate degree from MIT and his doctorate from
UC Berkeley. Currently, he teaches courses about Computer Organization
and Operating Systems. He is well recognized for his texts on
computer science, which are famous as standard texts in the field,
including "Computer Networks", "Operating Systems: Design and
Implementation", and "Structured Computer Organization".




--
http://monkey.org/~dugsong/


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  Ben Rousch
  brousch at gmail.com
  http://ishmilok.blogspot.com/

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