Minix: Using QEMU

Minix is too nice an operating system to just ignore it. It's different, it's small and it's stable. And FP and I attended a lecture by AST at Dellif University, in October 2008. Very amusing and afterwards we joined AST in the bar. He is better approachable than Linus, I guess. AST is a nice guy. And a good programmer. And a decent lecturer with lots of wits.

So now and then I take a look at Minix again. But now I had some knowledge of emulators being run in Linux. Initially I wanted to install Bochs and then use Bochs to install Minix. But the Bochs documentation not very clear, whereas Qemu is easier to use and it has a tutorial on howto install Minix using Qemu: http://www.minix3.ucsc.edu/wikis/minix3/Running_MINIX_3_on_Qemu .

This webpage is about my experiences doing so.

Minix : installing QEMU

This is Slackware country and Slackware does not come with a qemu package. So I needed to get the sources and do a full compile. I got the qemu tarball from internet and installed it, as root, in '/root' to untar it. Then the usual three commands were issued:

  1. ./configure
  2. make
  3. make install
The first command takes a few minutes to complete (on a 3 GHz Pentium 4) and the third takes a little longer. But the 'make' command seems to take forever. On my system it took close to a full hour to compile the qemu package. No wonder that the 4 MB sourcetree grew to become 400 MB in size.
So if your version of Linux has a binaries package, use that. It saves a lot of listening to a whining CPU fan.

Minix : installing it with QEMU

Qemu is full featured virtual PC. For the system being emulated, it is 100% sure that it is dealing with one very well standardised and supported x86 based computer system. But it's just being fooled. The steps to take now are:

  1. Create a virtual disk
  2. Copy an iso file to the same directory as the virtual disk is in
  3. Start the emulator to run and install Minix
  4. Restart the emulator to postconfigure Minix
I carried out all tasks as user 'jan'. No root privileges required. 
   $ cd develop
   $ mkdir minix
   $ cd minix
   $ qemu-img create minix.img 2G
   $ qemu -localtime -net user -net nic -m 128 -cdrom IDE-3.1.2a.iso -hda minix.img -boot d
   $ qemu -localtime -net user -net nic -m 256 -cdrom IDE-3.1.2a.iso -hda minix.img -boot c
A 2 GB file is created that serves as a harddisk. The Minix CD iso image is installed right next to this virtual disk. It could be stored anywhere, but this is a convenient place.

Remember that Qemu is an emulator. Things can take some time. Setting up and running Minix is reasonably fast. But when you are going to do a packman install of all 46 packages, take your time. This job also takes a few hours to complete....

Minix : running it in Qemu

The ACK is a superb compiler. There is a port to Linux, but then the ACK is a cat in a foreign warehouse. It's derailed. It's out of its mind. The ACK needs to be in Minix and now, ACK is home again. Just like all the other packages.
Qemu is nice. Yet it has its peculiarities and speed is not quite high. So I guess I will sacrifice one of my slow Dell Latitudes to host Minix as sole operating system. More to come.

I never got Qemu running at acceptable speeds...

Page created on 26 March 2009 and

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