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Comment by pictur | Hacker News Reader

What makes the minix operating system special?

MINIX was special because the book was used in many universities to teach operating system principles.

MINIX also one of the few affordable Unix-like operating systems you could run on your own PC, and it came with full source (except for the compiler)

Linus was running MINIX when he created Linux.

And finally there the famous discussion by Linus and Andy Tanenbaum (the creator of MINIX) about how operating systems should be structured.

Minix also runs Intel Management Engine in ring -3 on every CPU where it is enabled. That makes it one of the most deployed OS in the world.

Although this is Minix3 AFAIK which is quite different from the original Minix, with more BSD derived code, and designed for production not teaching.

In additional what phicoh said, it's also one of the most popular OS in the world.

https://www.networkworld.com/article/3236064/minix-the-most-...

Maybe not most popular but definitely most deployed

It's a working BSD licensed Unix like OS with a microkernel. Solid enough that Intel uses it for their management processors.

I think these features make it special: https://wiki.minix3.org/doku.php?id=www:documentation:reliab...

Note that there is quite a big difference in goals between the MINIX versions that were current when Linus started writing Linux (i.e. MINIX 2.0 and earlier) and the MINIX3 project.

For early versions of MINIX the goal was teaching. Many limitations were left in place, both to keep the system simple and leave space for assignments for undergraduate students.

Many people in the MINIX community went to the Linux community because Andy Tanenbaum would usualy reject patches and Linus would welcome them.

Way later the MINIX3 project was created as research project. It has many cool ideas.

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