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releases:3.2.0:start

MINIX Release 3.2.0

Documentation

Release Notes

Release date: February 29, 2012 (Leap Day)

Major Features

  • 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

Other important differences

  • The MINIX project now uses git as its version-control system

Known Issues

  • VirtualBox: Minix cannot be installed w/o hardware acceleration support (VT-x, AMD-V)
  • 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).
releases/3.2.0/start.txt · Last modified: 2014/11/12 20:13 by lionelsambuc