Operating Systems Design and Implementation, Third Edition

 The popularity of MINIX has continued, as can be observed by examining the number of hits for MINIX found by Google.

This third edition of the book has many changes throughout. Nearly all of the material on principles has been revised, and considerable new material has been added. However, the main change is the discussion of the new version of the system, called MINIX 3. and the inclusion of the new code in this book. Although loosely based on MINIX 2, MINIX 3 is fundamentally different in many key ways.

The design of MINIX 3 was inspired by the observation that operating systems are becoming bloated, slow, and unreliable. They crash far more often than other electronic devices such as televisions, cell phones, and DVD players and have so many features and options that practically nobody can understand them fully or manage them well. And of course, computer viruses, worms, spyware, spam, and other forms of malware have become epidemic.

To a large extent, many of these problems are caused by a fundamental design flaw in current operating systems: their lack of modularity. The entire operatng system is typically millions of lines of C/C++ code compiled into a single massive executable program run in kernel mode. A bug in any one of those millions of lines of code can cause the system to malfunction. Getting all this code correct is impossible, especially when about 70% consists of device drivers, written by third parties, and outside the purview of the people maintaining the operating system.

With MINIX 3, we demonstrate that this monolithic design is not the only possibility. The MINIX 3 kernel is only about 4000 lines of executable code, not the millions found in Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, or FreeBSD. The rest of the system, including all the device drivers (except the clock driver), is a collection of small, modular, user-mode processes, each of which is tightly restricted in what it can do and with which other processes it may communicate.

While MINIX 3 is a work in progress, we believe that this model of building an operating system as a collection of highly-encapsulated user-mode processes holds promise for building more reliable systems in the future. MINIX 3 is especially focused on smaller PCs (such as those commonly found in Third-World countries and on embedded systems, which are always resource constrained). In any event, this design makes it much easier for students to learn how an operating system works than attempting to study a huge monolithic system.

 

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