Minix vs Linux for Learning Operating System Design?

Question

I wish to learn operating system design. I was wondering if I should tackle Minix or GNU/Linux in the process? I like books so I would be following mainly a book, though video r

Answer 1

At an internship I did, I had to change the hard drive driver in Minix so that it serves requests using the elevator algorithm instead of first-come-first-served. I was supposed to do it in Minix 2, but I wanted to do it in Minix 3 because I never like using old technologies.

In the 2 months I was working on it, the most frustrating thing was that Minix 3 took about 20 minutes to compile in VMWare on a laptop with an I5 processor, 4GB of RAM running Windows 7. Finally, after 2 months, I gave up on Minix 3 and switched to Minix 2, which compiled in about 20 s.

Now I'm not saying there couldn't have been something very wrong about how I was compiling the system, but I was trying really hard to speed it up with no success.

Let me just say that at the time I had just received my Master's degree in computer science and I had 5 years of intensive experience with programming in C (just so that you don't think I'm a self-taught programmer that just decided to jump in to programming by redesigning an operating system :D )

EDIT: In the end, I suggest you to try compiling Minix 3 to see how it goes for you. If you have more luck, definitely go with this one because it has more modern OS concepts, on the other hand, if you are a complete beginner, you'll probably learn tons from Minix 2. I did.