===== MINIX 3.3.0 is Available Now =====

**[[..:download:|I can't wait, take me to the download page right now.]]**

In 2008, the European Research Council awarded Prof. Andrew S. Tanenbaum, the designer of MINIX, an Advanced Grant of €2.5 million (about $3.2 million) to produce a reliable operating system. He and his team have been working on it hard since then and they are now proud to release the result as a free and open-source operating system for the PC and ARM. It comes with a BSD license, meaning that individuals and companies can use it in products without paying royalties and without being required to disclose any changes they make to competitors.

MINIX 1 was originally a system aimed at teaching operating systems but after the ERC grant, the focus changed to include producing a solid, commercially viable product as well. The new version, MINIX 3.3.0, has a number of key features:

  * The system is based on a tiny (12,700 lines of code) microkernel
  * The microkernel handles interrupts and message passing and is the only code running in kernel mode.
  * The rest of the operating system runs as a collection of isolated, protected, user-mode processes
  * Each device driver is a separate user-mode process isolated by the MMU hardware
  * If a driver crashes, the system automatically restarts it, with running applications not even noticing
  * This means that MINIX 3.3.0 is self-healing
  * Userland is largely compatible with NetBSD and runs [[.:success|thousands of NetBSD packages]]
  * By combining an innovative self-healing research OS with NetBSD userland, we got the best of both worlds
  * Both the clang/LLVM and gcc compilers are available, as well as perl, python, etc.
  * MINIX 3.3.0 is available for both the x86 and ARM Cortex A8 architectures, making it ideal for embedded systems
  * [[https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/home:beng-nl/Minix3|Tools]] for cross compiling MINIX 3 for the ARM on Linux are provided
  * Ports are available now for the BeagleBoard XM, BeagleBone white, and BeagleBone black
  * Extensive documentation is available in the [[:|MINIX 3 wiki]]
  * The code has been improved over MINIX 3.2.1 in hundreds of ways, leading to a cleaner and more reliable system
  * Other features are listed [[..:documentation:features|here]].

Here are the Beagle single-board computers on which ARM MINIX 3.3.0 runs.
{{ www:download:beagles.jpg }}

To learn more about the MINIX 3 project, look [[..:documentation:read-more|here]].

The release notes for MINIX 3.3.0 can be found [[:releases:3.3.0|here]].

You can get the compressed .iso image from the [[..:download:|download page]].

Here are the instructions for the [[:developersguide:minixonarm|ARM build]].

Please come join our [[..:community:|community]].