MINIX 3 is a project to create a small, highly reliable

High availability

High availability is a system design approach and associated service implementation that ensures a prearranged level of operational performance will be met during a contractual measurement period....

 and functional Unix-like

Unix-like

A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification....

 operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

. It is published under the BSD license.

The main goal of the project is for the system to be fault-tolerant by detecting and repairing its own faults on the fly, without user intervention. The main uses of the operating system are envisaged to be embedded systems as well as the education sector, such as universities or the XO-1 laptop.

MINIX 3 currently supports IA-32

IA-32

IA-32 , also known as x86-32, i386 or x86, is the CISC instruction-set architecture of Intel's most commercially successful microprocessors, and was first implemented in the Intel 80386 as a 32-bit extension of x86 architecture...

 architecture PC compatible systems. It is also possible to run MINIX under emulator

Emulator

In computing, an emulator is hardware or software or both that duplicates the functions of a first computer system in a different second computer system, so that the behavior of the second system closely resembles the behavior of the first system...

s or virtual machine

Virtual machine

A virtual machine is a "completely isolated guest operating system installation within a normal host operating system". Modern virtual machines are implemented with either software emulation or hardware virtualization or both together.-VM Definitions:A virtual machine is a software...

s, such as Bochs

Bochs

Bochs is a portable x86 and x86-64 IBM PC compatible emulator and debugger mostly written in C++ and distributed as free software under GNU Lesser General Public License...

, VMware Workstation

VMware Workstation

VMware Workstation is a virtual machine software suite for x86 and x86-64 computers from VMware, a division of EMC Corporation, which allows users to set up multiple x86 and x86-64 virtual machines and use one or more of these virtual machines simultaneously with the hosting operating system...

, Microsoft Virtual PC

Microsoft Virtual PC

Windows Virtual PC is a virtualization program for Microsoft Windows. In July 2006 Microsoft released the Windows-hosted version as a free product...

, and QEMU

QEMU

QEMU is a processor emulator that relies on dynamic binary translation to achieve a reasonable speed while being easy to port on new host CPU architectures....

.