MINIX Release 3.2.0

Documentation

Release date: February 29, 2012 (Leap Day)

Clang is the default compiler (GCC is also supported)
NetBSD C library
ELF is the default executable format
Asynchronous, multithreaded virtual filesystem (VFS) server
Experimental SMP support
FUSE support (GSOC project by Evgeniy Ivanov)
NetBSD password file format (part of GSOC project by Vivek Prakash)
FS types infrastructure:
- Use a proper /etc/fstab file
- Clean/unclean FS flag in MFS
- Full base system ext2 integration: newfs, fsck, can install on ext2
- Do proper fsck -p on each boot for all fstab-listed filesystems
NetBSD bootloader
Smaller boot images (using gzip)
ProcFS: /proc file system
Multithreading and NCQ support in the AHCI driver
Debugging Improvements
- GDB and core dump support (GSOC project by Adriana Szekeres)
- Block device tracing
New NetBSD userland utilities (part of them as a GSOC project by Vivek Prakash)
- ext2 fsck&mkfs, gzip, m4, man&tools, mkdep, mkdir, mkfifo, mktemp, rm, rmdir, tic, uniq
- libcurses, libcrypt, libprop, libterminfo, libutil
- bzip2, date, indent, mdocml (mandoc), sed, zoneinfo ports
Better reliability
- Transparent recovery from block device driver crashes in file systems
- Transparent retry upon failing block device I/O in file systems
- New Faulty Block Device fault injection driver
- Servers and drivers run as unprivileged users
- Fix all (potential) bugs found by Clang's more elaborate warnings
Better virtualization support
- Added libvassert, to enable easier support for VMWare VAssert
- New VirtualBox time sync driver

VirtualBox: Minix cannot be installed w/o hardware acceleration support (VT-x, AMD-V)
- Workaround: See RunningMinixOnVirtualBox
Build warnings: Clang has much better diagnostics than ACK, so clang reports more warnings on the MINIX codebase. These warnings are being fixed over time.
Clang performance: On MINIX, clang builds more slowly than GCC. We are working on this. In the meantime, you have the option to build MINIX with GCC (CC=gcc).