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 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
• 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 here.

Here are the Beagle single-board computers on which ARM MINIX 3.3.0 runs.

To learn more about the MINIX 3 project, look here.

The release notes for MINIX 3.3.0 can be found here.

You can get the compressed .iso image from the download page.

Here are the instructions for the ARM build.

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