I took a class this spring about generic operating system theories and principles, and now I’d like to spend the summer working through Tanenbaum’s Operating Systems book, looking through Minix source, and getting a general idea of actual OS implementation.
There are two OS professors at school and I went to them to ask about borrow Tanenbaum’s book. Interestingly, one said I should use the older, second version of the book, and focus on Minix 2 because it’s overall simpler and has less source to understand (and thus would be easier to learn from without information overload). The other prof said she didn’t think this would be a problem, and that I should go with Minix 3 and the newest edition of his book so that I get to see a more modern implementation.
What does Stack Overflow think? Anyone here have experiences with both versions of Minix? I would like to learn the principles of making an actual OS, but I also don’t want massive information overload that will keep me from actually understanding what the code as a whole is up to.
If you want to go deep into sources of microkernel-based OS I would suggest you to have a look on HelenOS, a newer but still relatively simple operating system not burdened with UNIX semantics and API. Alas, there is no book (as the Tanenbaum) about it yet, but the sources are well documented.