Minix 2025

User:Stian had a plan to make a VM-based Minix lab for the community, but the state of running Minix is 2025 turns out to be surprisingly difficult.

Background

The only sensible way to run Minix (2.x) in 2025 is virtualized of course, and QEMU/KVM (ideally in Proxmox) would be the preferred way here. I briefly looked at Bochs too but it had its own set of problems.

Minix 2.x is generally installed from floppy, however the floppy driver in QEMU has been subtly broken for 20 years or so.

This guy has some ready-made HD images that seem to work, but I'd like to go from official bits and bytes rather than some guy on github's blob. How the template blob is made is not part of the repo afaics.

Ideas to try

• The DOSMINIX image is a ready-made HD image, but it's not clear to me what it would take to adapt it to QEMU. It has a sort of external bootloader in the dos executable that does oldschool magic.
• Another way forward is to reverse-engingeer the floppy installation process with bind mounts etc, so that we can build a HD image outside the virtualization.
• Hard mode: patch QEMU's floppy driver so it works again.
• Look more into Bochs? I think one of the issues there was they'd dropped support for some older hw. No NE2k networking possible, iirc. (PPP might still work of course). I also couldn't get it to boot properly but that might be PEBKAC.
• Virtualbox is not qemu and has floppy support, might be possible to run the installation there.
• Long shot: boot the minix3 iso and hope the compatibility tooling is somehow able to do it?
• bhyve? doesn't help, no floppy support.