• Corpus ID: 31274027

Examining the Viability of MINIX 3 as a Consumer Operating System

@inproceedings{Loew2016ExaminingTV,
  title={Examining the Viability of MINIX 3 as a Consumer Operating System},
  author={Joshua C. Loew},
  year={2016}
}

• Joshua C. Loew
• Published 2016
• Computer Science

The developers of the MINIX 3 operating system (OS) believe that a computer should work like a television set. You should be able to purchase one, turn it on, and have it work flawlessly for the next ten years [6]. MINIX 3 is a free and open-source microkernel-based operating system. MINIX 3 is still in development, but it is capable of running on x86 and ARM processor architectures. Such processors can be found in computers such as embedded systems, mobile phones, and laptop computers. As a light and simple operating system, MINIX 3 could take the place of the software that many people use every day. As of now, MINIX 3 is not particularly useful to a non-computer scientist. Most interactions with MINIX 3 are done through a command-line interface or an obsolete window manager. Moreover, its tools require some low-level experience with UNIX-like systems to use. This project will examine the viability of MINIX 3 from a performance standpoint to determine whether or not it is relevant to a non-computer scientist. Furthermore, this project attempts to measure how a microkernel-based operating system performs against a traditional monolithic kernel-based OS.