See how MINIX runs drivers and services as separate processes, and how they pass messages.
Read a MINIX process table, then trace how MINIX separates privilege and passes messages between its servers. Chapters on services, recovery, networking and packages are being rebuilt. Begin with Linux Foundations Chapters 2 and 5: paths, listing files, cat and wc. No C programming is needed. The labs use MINIX 3.4.0rc6.
2 published lessons across 2 chapters, about 2 hours of work. Every lab runs on a real virtual machine in your browser, and checks your work on the machine itself.
Read the whole of a MINIX 3 machine out of one process table: the five kernel tasks under their negative numbers in /proc, every server and device driver as an ordinary process, the programs in /service, the reincarnation server records in /proc/service with their restart policies, the minix-service command, and the boot menu and modules the process table comes from.
What each part of a MINIX 3 machine is allowed to do, and where it is written. Read the service stanzas in /etc/system.conf and /etc/system.conf.d field by field, account for the kernel calls, IPC targets, I/O port ranges, interrupt lines and PCI identifiers each one grants, learn the default for every field a stanza omits, and match a stanza to the device it claimed in /proc/pci, the driver map in /proc/dmap and the live record in /proc/service, including the endpoint arithmetic that makes a restart safe.
MINIX 3 has 2 published lessons, roughly 2 hours of guided work, spread across 2 chapters.
No. Every lab boots a real virtual machine in your browser, with a real Linux shell. There is nothing to install, and nothing on your own machine to break.
Labs in this track are rated intermediate.