"News" page last update: March 2016. Maybe need a "(2014)" on the title, looks like that was when 3.3.0 was released.
Ok, added. Thanks!
Related. Others?
Minix development has been abandoned? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36064961 - May 2023 (109 comments)
Ask HN: Is Minix dead? No commits since 2018 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26451540 - March 2021 (142 comments)
Minix 3.3.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8324578 - Sept 2014 (172 comments)
Minix 3.2.1 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5272980 - Feb 2013 (24 comments)
I remember having to implement partial file locking in Minix as an assignment in college. Good times,
not sure what makes this "news" but it did give me some nostalgia in the "Getting Started" page:
> Now you are ready to start the installation procedure. When installing to the bare computer, put the CD-ROM in the drive, close the door and shut the computer down.
Now mostly used in the Intel Management Engine.
Dead project?
Deader than disco. I seem to reiterate the technical reasons every couple of months or so [1], therefore this time I'll talk more about the management of the project, although I was not a member of the core team so it's mostly observation from the outside in.
Historically, the operating system was largely used as a research platform for writing papers and theses [2]. Unfortunately, research code isn't production-grade code, so despite a lot of effort done to mainline some of it, not all of it was merged. Also, while there was a steady supply of new students to work on MINIX3, there was also a steady turnover because students who finish their studies generally move on to new things.
With the looming retirement of Andrew Tanenbaum in 2014, the project pivoted focus to embedded systems, due to the technical strengths and weaknesses of the system at that time. The ARM port was done around that time as part of it to leverage small board computers. Eventually, the funding dried up and the project slowed to a standstill, largely I believe due to an unsustainable maintenance burden caused by accumulated tech debt over decades that the remaining development manpower (all contributors working on their free time, including myself) couldn't address.
MINIX3 still has some unique cool stuff to this day like seamless live updates of system components, but for me it's too shackled by its past to have a future. It'd be a lot of work to bring it up to modern standards and personally by the time I'd be done with that I think ought to be done, it wouldn't look like MINIX anymore.
> Deader than disco.
The real question is whether the project is deader than HURD.
Given that HURD has a steady trickle of commits and an ongoing quarterly status update on their website, it's more alive than MINIX3 currently is.
Harder to say in practice than that, because Minix 3 has production deployments on the Intel (CS)ME, across hundreds of millions of machines, something that the Hurd never had
easy win, HURD was never alive in the first place to be dead
Yes.