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I found this site: http://www.os-forum.com/minix/boot/ which claims to document the boot sequence of Minix.

But in the source tree of Minix 3.2 I just get from Git, the files described in the above site simply don't exist.

They are:

masterboot.s
bootblock.s
boothead.s
boot.c
bootimage.c
rawfs.c

Does Minix change the way it boots?

Is there any documentation about how Minix boot itself?

Thanks!

0xC0000022L
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smwikipedia
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    If anyone vote for close, please give a reason and don't do that anonymously. – smwikipedia May 14 '12 at 14:03
  • The website you link to is referring to the second edition of the book from 1997 and likely not at all relevant for Minix3. And no, I didn't vote for closing. Actually I find the question interesting. – 0xC0000022L May 14 '12 at 14:27
  • Thanks. I want to analyze a true micro-kernel OS, so I turn to Minix. But the boot sequence turns out to be quite a secret. If someone one really wants Minix to be popular, why make it so unnecessarily obscure. – smwikipedia May 14 '12 at 14:39

1 Answers1

8

That web page talks about Minix as described in the second edition of Operating Systems, i.e. Minix 2. The equivalent documentation for Minix 3 is on the Minix wiki. Some of that is also out-of-date, as -- in 3.2 -- Minix adopted the NetBSD bootloader.

There is some documentation how NetBSD boots, but it's not a good as the site you're talking about. For source, start looking in this folder: https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix/tree/master/sys/arch/i386/stand

Sridhar Sarnobat
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Andrew Schleifer
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