Keynote: MINIX 3

Operating systems are getting bigger and less reliable every year. Studies have shown the number of bugs per line of code to be around 1-10 bugs per 1000 lines of code, so with Linux over 3 million lines of code, the kernel probably contains 3000 to 30,000 bugs, and Windows has far more. Most of these bugs are in the device drivers. As long as we maintain the current structure of the operating system as a huge single monolithic program running in kernel mode, the situation will only get worse.

In an attempt to improve this situation, we have created a new multiserver operating system with only 5000 lines in kernel and the rest of the operating system split up into small rigidly controlled pieces, each running as a separate user-mode process protected by the MMU hardware. The talk will discuss the architecture of this system, called MINIX 3, and its reliability and security properties.