• MinixReleases

MINIX Releases

This page provides some information on the various MINIX 3 releases. You can download release media from the download page.

Current Status

The current stable MINIX release is: 3.1.8.

The current in-development MINIX version is: 3.2.0.

Release 3.1.8

Release date: October 4, 2010

Major Features:

• New package management infrastructure: pkgsrc and pkgin (contributed by Gautam Tirumala)
• Unix Domain Socket support (contributed by Thomas Cort)
• Multiboot support (contributed by Feiran Zheng)
• Ext2 support (contributed by Evgeniy Ivanov)

• ACPI driver

• full APIC mode including IO APICs

• Experimental AHCI support

Known Issues:

• VirtualBox: Minix 3.1.8 cannot be installed w/o hardware acceleration support (VT-x, AMD-V)

  • Workaround: See UsersGuide/RunningMinixOnVirtualBox

• VirtualBox 3.1 cannot boot Minix. Please use VirtualBox 3.2.

• Some packman packages have not been ported to pkgsrc yet

Release 3.1.7

Release date: June 16, 2010

Major Features:

• Userspace scheduling and a scheduling server (contributed by Bjorn Swift)
• Proper support for multiple ethernet cards of the same type
• Bugfixes (such as workaround to run on recent KVM)
• Debug features ("verbose" boot monitor variable, access to debug registers DR0-DR7 in kernel)

• Boot monitor allows loading images > 16 MB

• Root partition size increased to 64MB (and setup script can now more or less safely deal with root partitions with non-default sizes)
• Buildsystem support for building MINIX with GCC
• Source tree reorganization/cleanup
• New ports: Git, GCC updated to version 4.4.3
• Secondary FS cache layer in VM that uses all available memory, reducing I/O wait time a lot
• Support for the cp1251 and koi8-u charsets (contributed by Roman Ignatov)

Known Issues:

• VirtualBox: Minix 3.1.7 cannot be installed w/o hardware acceleration support (VT-x, AMD-V)

  • Workaround: See UsersGuide/RunningMinixOnVirtualBox

• VirtualBox 3.1 cannot boot Minix. Please use VirtualBox 3.2.

• VirtualPC: the DEC Tulip network driver is broken
  • Fix: upgrade to SVN-trunk

Release 3.1.6

Release date: February 8, 2010

Major Features:

• New drivers: Atheros L2, Intel E1000, Realtek 8169, DEC Tulip
• VirtualPC Network Support (DEC Tulip)
• PipeFS - removed pipe handling from filesystem drivers
• HGFS - support for mounting VMware shared folders as file system
• VFS: supplemental group support
• VFS: sticky bit support
• FPU support
• System Event Framework (SEF)
• Experimental APIC support (disabled by default)
• More ports: more recent QEMU, BSD utilities, Benchmarks

Known Issues:

• VirtualBox 3.1 cannot boot Minix. Please use VirtualBox 3.0 for now.

• Qemu/KVM 0.12 cannot boot Minix. Please use Qemu/KVM 0.11 for now.

• VirtualBox: Minix 3.1.6 cannot be installed w/o hardware acceleration support (VT-x, AMD-V)

  • Workaround: See UsersGuide/RunningMinixOnVirtualBox

Release 3.1.5

Release date: November 5, 2009

Major Features:

• Better performance
• Shared memory
• setitimer function
• ISO9660 FS
• Open Source Sound System
• Trap NULL accesses now, for user convenience
• Improved signal handling
• Better support for debuggers (ptrace improvements, etc.)
• Network card autodetection (for supported PCI cards), improved network configuration
• More ports: PostgreSQL, QEMU, Sudo, and a more recent OpenSSH, Tcpdump, Nedit, Gnu Go

Known Issues:

• VirtualBox: Minix 3.1.5 cannot be installed w/o hardware acceleration support (VT-x, AMD-V)

  • Workaround: See UsersGuide/RunningMinixOnVirtualBox

• VMware: after working correctly for a period of time, the lance driver may stop working silently, causing all network traffic to be dropped for some period of time.
  • Workaround: when this happens, run "service refresh lance" as root to restart the lance driver.
  • This issue has been fixed in the Minix trunk available from Subversion.

Release 3.1.4

Release date: June 9, 2009

Major Features:

• Virtual Memory support
• Improved Virtual Machine support (when MINIX runs as guest)

Release 3.1.3a

Release date: June 8, 2007

• Fixes to 3.1.3

Release 3.1.3

Release date: April 13, 2007

Major Features:

• Virtual File System (VFS)

See http://www.minix3.org/download/releasenotes-3.1.3.html.

Release 3.1.2a

Release date: May 29, 2006

Major Features:

• Packman package manager

Known Issues:

• Installation issue when auto-partitioning disks.

Release 3.1.0 (Book Release)

Release date: October 24, 2005

First release of MINIX 3

Corresponds with source discussed in OSDIv3.