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Comment by metafex | Hacker News Reader

I may have the Plan 9 books on my shelf, but I too think that it is sad that Minix didn't succeed. Nonetheless, the grant from the European Union to fund further development of Minix is something really remarkable. With this Minix got a fair bit of fresh air and much needed work to bring it into this century :) Personally, I'm excited to try it out on a BeagleBone Black and tinker around a bit with it. It just has been too long since OS-dev was fun!

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> try it out on a BeagleBone Black and tinker around a bit with it

I've seen statements to this effect around, and it's kept me puzzled. Why ditch a VM that runs on your main dev computer, and instead opt for a BeageBone, rPI, etc.? With a separate computer (like a BeagleBone), you have to copy over the OS ri it each time after building it, and this takes up a small amount of additional effort and time (that could add up). Aren't VMs are faster for someone who wants to do a lot of tinkering and iterative OS development?

It's basically for the fun of it. Trying out exotic hardware and getting out of your comfort-zone. For me it's just exploring things and maybe a reason to dust off those gadgets and play around with them.

OTOH VMs are of course faster, more practical and even sometomes more reliable. For anything serious I'd be using one (and even am, for work, etc.)

VMs behave very different from real hardware. VMs are convenient have some very nice features, e.g. GDB debugging with QEMU. But if you're doing anything with hardware, you'll have to test on real hardware or everything will break the moment you do.

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