• MinixReleases

MINIX Releases

This page provides some information on the various MINIX 3 releases. You can download release media from the download page.

Current Status

The current stable MINIX release is: 3.2.1.

Release 3.2.1

Release date: February 21, 2013

Documentation: User's Guide and Developer's Guide

Major Features:

• Development:

  • Support for dynamically linked executables, also build shared versions of base system libraries. See UsersGuide/UsingSharedLibraries.

  • Remove the use of Intel segments altogether, giving a performance boost while context switching. Rely exclusively on page tables.
  • Added support for SYSENTER/SYSCALL based system kernel calls, a significant performance improvement

  • Full new clean updated NetBSD build system import. build.sh is supported, allowing crossbuilding MINIX 3. See Crosscompile MINIX.

  • Imported or upgraded many userland utilities and libraries from NetBSD: libc, lorder, join, mtree, tsort, cksum, kill, xinstall, du, libutil, tic, postinstall, flex, zlib, bsdtar, ls, sort, cat, echo, pax, file, mktemp, libc,csu, curses, byacc, tput, test, ln, nvi,ctags, infocomp, nbperf, make, m4, bzip2, libcrypt, printf, passwd, make, ed, nawk, expr, pwd.

  • DDEKIT support (support for USB keyboards, mice and mass storage). See DdeKitUsb.

  • Generalization of the TTY driver
  • Small and large cleanup represented by retiring MINIXisms such as nonsymbolic rootdev, dev2name, checkhier, badblocks, readall, BIOS_SEG and umap_bios, bios_wini, C macros as _ANSI, _CONST, _VOLATILE, _SIZET, _ARGS, _VOID, PUBLIC, PRIVATE and FORWARD, _PROTOTYPE
  • VM: Generalized munmap (boot time ramdisk is now freed, saving memory)
  • VFS interaction with drivers is fully asynchronous, making VFS immune to uncooperative drivers
  • Exec performance improvement and generalization. Reduce copying, and kernel, RS, VFS and VM all use the same executable parsing code.
  • Some more abstraction in VM to support future improvements
  • Implemented dynamic mtab support and the mount -a command
  • Generalized the file system cache
• Changes
  • 'make world' was replaced with 'make build'
  • Dropped support for a.out binaries
• Drivers, FS
  • E1000 add support for 82545EM
  • EXT2 support improvements.

  • Virtio: virtio-blk, virtio-net drivers. See UsersGuide/RunningOnQemu.

  • Support for AHCI

  • Add VBFS: VirtualBox Shared Folder File System

  • rtl8169: add support for RTL8101E family
• Keymaps
  • Portuguese keymap
  • Brazilian keymap
• Userland
  • Rewritten sprofalyze in C for better performance

Known Issues:

• VirtualBox: Minix cannot be installed w/o hardware acceleration support (VT-x, AMD-V)

  • Workaround: See UsersGuide/RunningMinixOnVirtualBox

Release 3.2.0

Release date: February 29, 2012 (Leap Day)

Documentation: Users & Developers Guides

Major Features:

• Clang is the default compiler (GCC is also supported)
• NetBSD C library
• ELF is the default executable format
• Asynchronous, multithreaded virtual filesystem (VFS) server
• Experimental SMP support
• FUSE support (GSOC project by Evgeniy Ivanov)
• NetBSD password file format (part of GSOC project by Vivek Prakash)
• FS types infrastructure:
  • Use a proper /etc/fstab file
  • Clean/unclean FS flag in MFS
  • Full base system ext2 integration: newfs, fsck, can install on ext2

  • Do proper `fsck -p` on each boot for all fstab-listed filesystems

• NetBSD bootloader
• Smaller boot images (using gzip)
• ProcFS: /proc file system
• Multithreading and NCQ support in the AHCI driver
• Debugging Improvements
  • GDB and core dump support (GSOC project by Adriana Szekeres)
  • Block device tracing
• New NetBSD userland utilities (part of them as a GSOC project by Vivek Prakash)

  • ext2 fsck&mkfs, gzip, m4, man&tools, mkdep, mkdir, mkfifo, mktemp, rm, rmdir, tic, uniq

  • libcurses, libcrypt, libprop, libterminfo, libutil
  • bzip2, date, indent, mdocml (mandoc), sed, zoneinfo ports
• Better reliability
  • Transparent recovery from block device driver crashes in file systems
  • Transparent retry upon failing block device I/O in file systems
  • New Faulty Block Device fault injection driver
  • Servers and drivers run as unprivileged users
  • Fix all (potential) bugs found by Clang's more elaborate warnings
• Better virtualization support
  • Added libvassert, to enable easier support for VMWare VAssert

  • New VirtualBox time sync driver

Other important differences:

• The MINIX project now uses git as its version-control system

Known Issues:

• VirtualBox: Minix cannot be installed w/o hardware acceleration support (VT-x, AMD-V)

  • Workaround: See UsersGuide/RunningMinixOnVirtualBox

• Build warnings: Clang has much better diagnostics than ACK, so clang reports more warnings on the MINIX codebase. These warnings are being fixed over time.
• Clang performance: On MINIX, clang builds more slowly than GCC. We are working on this. In the meantime, you have the option to build MINIX with GCC (CC=gcc).

Release 3.1.8

Release date: October 4, 2010

Major Features:

• New package management infrastructure: pkgsrc and pkgin (contributed by Gautam Tirumala)
• Unix Domain Socket support (contributed by Thomas Cort)
• Multiboot support (contributed by Feiran Zheng)
• Ext2 support (contributed by Evgeniy Ivanov)

• ACPI driver

• full APIC mode including IO APICs

• Experimental AHCI support

Known Issues:

• VirtualBox: Minix 3.1.8 cannot be installed w/o hardware acceleration support (VT-x, AMD-V)

  • Workaround: See UsersGuide/RunningMinixOnVirtualBox

• VirtualBox 3.1 cannot boot Minix. Please use VirtualBox 3.2.

• Some packman packages have not been ported to pkgsrc yet

Release 3.1.7

Release date: June 16, 2010

Major Features:

• Userspace scheduling and a scheduling server (contributed by Bjorn Swift)
• Proper support for multiple ethernet cards of the same type
• Bugfixes (such as workaround to run on recent KVM)
• Debug features ("verbose" boot monitor variable, access to debug registers DR0-DR7 in kernel)

• Boot monitor allows loading images > 16 MB

• Root partition size increased to 64MB (and setup script can now more or less safely deal with root partitions with non-default sizes)
• Buildsystem support for building MINIX with GCC
• Source tree reorganization/cleanup
• New ports: Git, GCC updated to version 4.4.3
• Secondary FS cache layer in VM that uses all available memory, reducing I/O wait time a lot
• Support for the cp1251 and koi8-u charsets (contributed by Roman Ignatov)

Known Issues:

• VirtualBox: Minix 3.1.7 cannot be installed w/o hardware acceleration support (VT-x, AMD-V)

  • Workaround: See UsersGuide/RunningMinixOnVirtualBox

• VirtualBox 3.1 cannot boot Minix. Please use VirtualBox 3.2.

• VirtualPC: the DEC Tulip network driver is broken
  • Fix: upgrade to SVN-trunk

Release 3.1.6

Release date: February 8, 2010

Major Features:

• New drivers: Atheros L2, Intel E1000, Realtek 8169, DEC Tulip
• VirtualPC Network Support (DEC Tulip)
• PipeFS - removed pipe handling from filesystem drivers
• HGFS - support for mounting VMware shared folders as file system
• VFS: supplemental group support
• VFS: sticky bit support
• FPU support
• System Event Framework (SEF)
• Experimental APIC support (disabled by default)
• More ports: more recent QEMU, BSD utilities, Benchmarks

Known Issues:

• VirtualBox 3.1 cannot boot Minix. Please use VirtualBox 3.0 for now.

• Qemu/KVM 0.12 cannot boot Minix. Please use Qemu/KVM 0.11 for now.

• VirtualBox: Minix 3.1.6 cannot be installed w/o hardware acceleration support (VT-x, AMD-V)

  • Workaround: See UsersGuide/RunningMinixOnVirtualBox

Release 3.1.5

Release date: November 5, 2009

Major Features:

• Better performance
• Shared memory
• setitimer function
• ISO9660 FS
• Open Source Sound System
• Trap NULL accesses now, for user convenience
• Improved signal handling
• Better support for debuggers (ptrace improvements, etc.)
• Network card autodetection (for supported PCI cards), improved network configuration
• More ports: PostgreSQL, QEMU, Sudo, and a more recent OpenSSH, Tcpdump, Nedit, Gnu Go

Known Issues:

• VirtualBox: Minix 3.1.5 cannot be installed w/o hardware acceleration support (VT-x, AMD-V)

  • Workaround: See UsersGuide/RunningMinixOnVirtualBox

• VMware: after working correctly for a period of time, the lance driver may stop working silently, causing all network traffic to be dropped for some period of time.
  • Workaround: when this happens, run "service refresh lance" as root to restart the lance driver.
  • This issue has been fixed in the Minix trunk available from Subversion.

Release 3.1.4

Release date: June 9, 2009

Major Features:

• Virtual Memory support
• Improved Virtual Machine support (when MINIX runs as guest)

Release 3.1.3a

Release date: June 8, 2007

• Fixes to 3.1.3

Release 3.1.3

Release date: April 13, 2007

Major Features:

• Virtual File System (VFS)

See http://www.minix3.org/download/releasenotes-3.1.3.html.

Release 3.1.2a

Release date: May 29, 2006

Major Features:

• Packman package manager

Known Issues:

• Installation issue when auto-partitioning disks.

Release 3.1.0 (Book Release)

Release date: October 24, 2005

First release of MINIX 3

Corresponds with source discussed in OSDIv3.