MINIX Release 3.2.1

• UsersGuide

• DevelopersGuide

Release date: February 21, 2013

• Development:
  • Support for dynamically linked executables, also build shared versions of base system libraries. See 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 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

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