[GRLUG] Tanenbaum in Ann Arbor

[Michael Mol]

My understanding is that it's primarily an educational tool.

Debian and Arch both have Hurd distributions, if you want to try a
microkernel system. As I recall, Emacs was recently ported to Hurd as
well (via the Arch distribution, not directly on top, amusing as that
would be), which means you should be able to do darn near anything.

Expect the driver availability issues to feel a lot like Linux in the
mid to late 90s.

With luck, SATA AHCI, SVGA, USB UHCI/EHCI and a handful of
standardized USB profiles like HID(intput) and CDC(networking) would
be close to enough to get a new system's foot in the door on x86.

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 12:03 PM, Ben Rousch <brousch at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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