Minix 3

Minix 3 is a small, Unix-like operating system published under a BSD-3-Clause license, and is a successor project to the earlier versions, Minix 1.x and 2.0. The project's main goal is for the system to be fault-tolerant by detecting and repairing its faults on the fly, with no user intervention. The main uses of the system are envisaged to be embedded systems and education. As of 2017, Minix 3 supports IA-32 and ARM architecture processors. It can also run on emulators or virtual machines, such as Bochs, VMware Workstation, Microsoft Virtual PC, Oracle VirtualBox, and QEMU. A port to PowerPC architecture is in development. In 2026, an independent Minix 3 fork called MEECHO was released for the 64-bit Arm architecture (AArch64). According to the project documentation, it boots on QEMU and on the Rockchip RK3566-based BIGTREETECH CB2 single-board computer. The distribution comes on a live CD and does not support live USB installation. The project has been dormant since late 2018, and the latest release is 3.4.0 rc6 from 2017, although the Minix 3 discussion group is still active. Minix 3 is the Intel Management Engine (ME) OS found in Intel's Platform Controller Hub, starting with the introduction of ME 11, which is used with Skylake and Kaby Lake processors. It was debated that Minix could have been the most widely used OS on x86/AMD64 processors, with more installations than Microsoft Windows, Linux, or macOS, because of its use in the Intel ME.