Earlier versions (under the name SunOS MINIX) have been used in assignments for a 4th year honours paper since 1992. Technical report 05/93 gives an introduction to SunOS MINIX, and much of the work done using it.
A Masters project (undertaken by Daniel Ayers) involved implementing a monitoring environment for SunOS MINIX so as to allow its use in undergraduate operating system laboratories. The fact that SunOS MINIX is hosted under SunOS has enabled a sophisticated set of monitoring tools to be implemented under SunOS. Daniel implemented the control and communication infrastructure, and used that to create a small number of monitoring clients. One is a a window that shows the current process tree. The display is updated in real-time as processes are born and die.
Some work has been done on a Java/CORBA version of the monitoring tools written for Solaris MINIX. Many more display tools can be developed. A hyper-text browser for OS data structures is one I would like to do. Ultimately it would be nice to integrate the monitoring tools with Solaris MINIX.
Another project has been to instrument Solaris MINIX to record interaction networks (more information on interaction networks is accessible from the Amoeba monitoring home page). Technical report 04.96 contains several case studies that show how interaction networks can be used to illustrate some of the complex message passing patterns that arise in Solaris MINIX. Technical report 08.95 is an earlier report that shows similar message passing patterns in SunOS MINIX. The interaction network recording and analysis software is part of the Solaris MINIX release.
Another good MINIX page is Minix on the Net.
Paul Ashton
Modified: 3-Nov-1999