MINIX 3.2.1

MINIX is an open source operating system designed to be highly reliable and secure.

This MINIX project is based somewhat on previous versions of MINIX, but is fundamentally different in many key ways.


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What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

Development:

· Support for dynamically linked executables, also build shared versions of base system libraries
· http://wiki.minix3.org/en/UsersGuide/UsingSharedLibraries.
· Remove the use of Intel segments altogether, giving a performance boost while context switching. Rely exclusively on page tables. (more info)
· Added support for SYSENTER/SYSCALL based system kernel calls, a significant performance improvement. (more info)
· Full new clean updated NetBSD build system import. build.sh is supported, allowing crossbuilding MINIX 3.
· http://wiki.minix3.org/en/DevelopersGuide/Crosscompiling
· Imported or upgraded many userland utilities and libraries from NetBSD: libc, lorder, join, mtree, tsort, cksum, kill, xinstall, du, libutil, tic, postinstall, flex, zlib, bsdtar, ls, sort, cat, echo, pax, file, mktemp, libc,csu, curses, byacc, tput, test, ln, nvi,ctags, infocomp, nbperf, make, m4, bzip2, libcrypt, printf, passwd, make, ed, nawk, expr, pwd.
· DDEKIT support (support for USB keyboards, mice and mass storage).
· http://wiki.minix3.org/en/DdeKitUsb
· Generalization of the TTY driver.
· Small and large cleanup represented by retiring MINIXisms such as nonsymbolic rootdev, dev2name, checkhier, badblocks, readall, BIOS_SEG and umap_bios, bios_wini, C macros as _ANSI, _CONST, _VOLATILE, _SIZET, _ARGS, _VOID, PUBLIC, PRIVATE and FORWARD, _PROTOTYPE.
· VM: Generalized munmap (boot time ramdisk is now freed, saving memory).
· VFS interaction with drivers is fully asynchronous, making VFS immune to uncooperative drivers. (more info)
· http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_Normal_Form
· Exec performance improvement and generalization. Reduce copying, and kernel, RS, VFS and VM all use the same executable parsing code.
· Some more abstraction in VM to support future improvements.
· Implemented dynamic mtab support and the mount -a command
· Generalized the file system cache. (more info)

Changes:

· Make world was replaced with make build
· Dropped support for a.out binaries

Drivers, FS:

· E1000 add support for 82545EM
· EXT2 support improvements. (more info)
· Virtio: virtio-blk, virtio-net drivers
· How to use: http://wiki.minix3.org/en/UsersGuide/RunningOnQemu
· Support for AHCI
· Add VBFS: VirtualBox Shared Folder File System
· rtl8169: add support for RTL8101E family

Keymaps:

· Portuguese keymap
· Brazilian keymap

Userland:

· Rewritten sprofalyze in C for better performance.