Andrew S. Tanenbaum Receives ACM Software System Award

Why did they use Minix and not e.g. L4 or sel4?

Which version of Minix did they actually use? There is Minix v3.1 (released in 2005 with the book), 3.2 (released in 2012) and 3.3 (released in 2014).

I'm curious if this is actually true, considering various ARM MCUs and SOCs seem to dominate in quantity. Considering these largely run some sort of Linux or RTOS, I'd be curious to see if MINIX or Linux is more widespread?

ACM should call on AST to disavow this before receipt of any award.

Not to mention MINIX is hidden away in almost every modern Intel CPU as part of its Management Engine.

Sometimes I wonder how the world would be today if MINIX was distributed with a FLOSS license similar to Linux. I think the Linus Torvalds vs Andrew Tanenbaum debate could have been a pivotal moment in tech history by the way MINIX missed a huge opportunity to step up in the history.

This type of thing always seemed to be in the very cool but pointless basket, to me.

A lot of systems researchers were absolutely obsessed with clustering, network transparency, distributed systems, and viewed them as the pinnacle of the operating system. I never understood why. I completely understand the coolness factor mind you, I just never could see why it was so important that your server-laptop-phone-network system behaved as a single system.

I think a lot of effort was wasted chasing that dragon. Wasted is probably the wrong word because research into cool things is good and probably created useful things along the way. I don't feel there was ever enough justification put into it and it could possibly have been better spent though.

The alternative of having multi-system tools and programming models that allow you to manage multiple systems without having them appear as a single image at the lowest level didn't get much love from academia after TCP/IP, and was largely developed by industry.

If you really wanted to do this, it would be fairly trivial to implement with Erlang/Elixir. We have thr technology - just no motivation (i.e. no profit in it)

There is still a lot of research and innovation, but it doesn't always come in the way of completely new software projects. The cost of trying to build a new OS is simply massive. You need to be compatible with existing useful software if you want to do anything other than an appliance. Anything that provides a new paradigm shift that requires changing existing software has a huge slog ahead of it to make it successful. That said, there is tons of incremental progress in the operating systems.

I think a lot of folks have thought about the idea of a truly distributed operating system. I'm pretty sure existing operating systems will eventually evolve in that direction. You already see bits and pieces of it popping up.

You should be looking at infrastructure related roles for this stuff; live migrations of VMs and containers are regularly done when you drain a VM or Kubernetes minion, for example.

For consumers, they mostly care about the user experience. Having software that syncs their contents to a server thus making it available to all devices has much lower overhead than trying to live migrate a process over unreliable networks.

running a distributed operating system where processes could be be freely migrated between my phone, desktop, laptop and NAS without too much of a hitch.

This was what i always wanted ever since i read Tanenbaum's "Modern Operating Systems" and in particular his "Amoeba distributed OS" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoeba_(operating_system) Also see Plan 9/Inferno from Bell Labs. But instead what we got (due to industry shenanigans) is this garbage/duct-tape of distribution gone crazy in the "Cloud".

The research has not stalled at all, the incentive to make consumer devices has because of the capture by tech giants. If someone wanted to implement an interesting idea like this, they would be harshly judged for not being able to compete with pixels and iphones for the rest of the stack. See Rabbit for example.

What you are describing is the bread and butter of modern systems research and all the large cloud providers internally implement this kind of thing.

Sounds like you like myself have taken Rob Pike’s take from long ago to heart http://www.herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf

While plenty of things have happened since that paper, I have this sinking feeling that he was right and we just stopped trying to really expand and explore what’s possible. But it may be more a matter of the state of academia than about the domain itself. It’s not like people were getting a bunch of conference invitations for GPGPU applications with ML until hype freight trains hit. This sobering reality of academic hegemony and grant chasing kept me from ever getting terribly interested in systems research unfortunately.

Out of curiosity, which was the recommended book?

Wow. Which book?

I had Tannenbaum books in in two of my CS courses too 2 decades back. They were great textbooks, found them quite accessible too

Well, it “inspired” Linux because Linus was unhappy with Minix. Linus wanted UNIX and Minix was not what he was looking for. I don’t think emulating Minix itself was ever his goal. He chose the Minix file system originally but this was just pragmatic as that is what his drive was formatted with.

The earliest versions of Linux were written on Minix though. Credit where credit is due.

Interestingly, Linus was unaware of BSD. He has said that, if he had known about it, he may never have written Linux to begin with.

What keeps it from becoming a free software backdoor?

A different license wouldn't change that. They would just find some way to do it with BSD or some other OS.

right in every its piece except license.

But then it would not be the "most popular OS" right? Whats your logic here?

MINIX3's development has stalled years ago.

Basically, around MINIX 3.2.0 (just before I stated contributing) the OS ditched its homegrown userland and adopted the NetBSD source tree + pkgsrc. While that boosted the software compatibility of MINIX3 in the short term, the maintenance burden of keeping up with upstream with such a large diff proved unsustainable in the long term, especially after the grant money dried up.

In hindsight, my opinion is that MINIX3 should've gone with NetBSD binary compatibility. The NetBSD syscall table would've been a far slower moving target to keep up with than the entire NetBSD source tree.

The OS also had a significant amount of tech debt, especially in the microkernel which was uniprocessor and 32-bit only, as well as outdated hardware support which meant nobody was daily-driving it anymore. It also was an aging design: while the system was divided up into user-mode servers with message-based communication, you couldn't containerize a process by spawning a parallel userland ecosystem for example because it wasn't capability-based or namespaceable.

It's too bad really, because the base system had really impressive capabilities. It could transparently survive crashes of stateless drivers, even when stress-testing it by injecting faults into the drivers at runtime. You could live-update the various system services at runtime without losing state or impacting clients. Some really good papers came out of MINIX3 [1].

I've ranted more in detail before, both on HN [2] as well on Google Groups [3]. I do not fault the maintainers for the current state of affairs because keeping up the MINIX3 userland against modern software standards was a major maintenance burden, so adopting NetBSD's one way or another was inevitable. At any rate, there are other micro-kernel based operating systems [4], some under active development, so MINIX's spirit lives on.

[1] https://wiki.minix3.org/doku.php?id=publications

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34916261

[3] https://groups.google.com/g/minix3/c/qUdPZ0ansVw/m/7LuOv0YOA...

[4] http://www.microkernel.info/

Not even a commit in years. Yes, I would say it is dead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deb...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40761968

I wonder if they simply don't want to reward his toxicity.

Perhaps a consolation prize that Linus doesn't need...

It was one of my degree course books. Thoroughly enjoyed it!

One of the best textbooks I had to read for my degree, back in the 80s. The appendix containg the Minix source code was my first exposure to a large body of well-written C code.

Which one? He has written more than one great book. :-)

Although this is a thread about Tanenbaum, personally I feel that Data Communications and Networking by Forouzan helps explain things in a better way and goes into the details of each network layer.

Modern Operating Systems is great though, and when I was in college I've recommended it to peers whose feedback was along the same lines.

This was my favourite textbook of my entire undergrad CS studies. I still have it on my shelf to this day. I've never gone deep into networking but the broad knowledge has stayed with me and comes in useful again and again. I would say it sets me apart from many other engineers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

Has some pointers to the orig source

he was the person behind electoral-vote.com

electoral-vote.com is still going strong: https://www.electoral-vote.com/

I'm sure you know this, but I want to emphasize it for anyone who is not aware.

Prof Tanenbaum has a co-writer now (Prof Bates, history at UCLA/Cal Poly), and the site is published every day (used to be weekdays only and only during election cycles).

People should know that electoral-vote.com is not just an election science blog at this point; Andrew and his co-writer Christopher Bates publish a very cogent summary each morning of the previous day's political news and its possible effects on US politics. You could read only their dispassionate but witty daily posts and be a reasonably well informed American citizen.