I was one of those students saving up the large sum for the book, when Linux was announced. There were other tensions at the time - the biggest was that Minix on 8086 was 16 bit real mode only. Someone had developed patches to run in 32 bit protected mode, but they were invasive and large, and the Minix maintainers would not integrate them as the increased complexity would not help the mission of Minix being easy to learn and tinker with. The filesystem code was also single threaded, essentially doing one request at a time. IIRC there were patches to address that too, also not integrated for the same reason. (Note that the books included print outs of the source so keeping it short did matter.)This explains the final 2 sentences of the original Linux announcement:
> PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(.
The book publisher is blamed for preventing Minix from being freely distributed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix#Licensing
jacquesm|14 days ago
Ironically, that single threaded nature of the FS made it a perfect match for my own little OS and I happily hacked it to pieces to bootstrap it using message passing into a FS executable. That trick probably saved me a year in bringing up the kernel to the point that the OS could compile itself, which greatly sped up development.
justin66|14 days ago
Not to defend the textbook grift or the lack of vision here, but I strongly suspect an undergraduate minix course taught at VU would be very good. It’s not obvious to me that it would be inferior to the xv6-based course taught at MIT, for example.
cryptonector|15 days ago