Lezing Tanenbaum - Minix 3

Dit keer een praatje van de bekende informaticus A. Tanenbaum. Het praatje zal gaan over het besturingssysteem Minix 3 (zie abstract)

Abstract:

MINIX 3: A Reliable and Secure Operating System
Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam

Most computer users nowadays are nontechnical people and have a
mental model of what they expect from a computer based on their
experience with TV sets and stereos: you buy it, plug it in, and
it works perfectly for the next 10 years. Unfortunately, they are
often disappointed as computers are not very reliable when
measured against the standards of other consumer electronics
devices.

A part of the problem is the operating system, which is
often millions of lines of kernel code, each of which can
potentially bring the system down. The worst offenders are the
device drivers, which have been shown to have bug rates 3-7x more
than the rest of the system. As long as we maintain the current
structure of the operating system as a huge single monolithic
program full of foreign code and running in kernel mode, the
situation will only get worse. While there have been ad hoc
attempts to patch legacy systems, what is needed is a different
approach.

In an attempt to provide much higher reliability, we have created
a new multiserver operating system with only 9000 lines in kernel
and the rest of the operating system split up into small
components each running as a separate user-mode process. For
example, each device driver runs as a separate process and is
rigidly controlled by the kernel to give it the absolute minimum
amount of power to prevent bugs in it from damaging other system
components. A reincarnation server periodically tests each user-
mode component and automatically replaces failed or failing
components on the fly, without bringing the system down and in
some cases without affecting user processes. The talk will
discuss the architecture of this system, called MINIX 3,

The system can be downloaded for free from www.minix3.org.