Manual pages

Ixolo ships its manual pages on the system itself. Type man at the shell. There is no HTML copy on this site yet. This page tells you what is installed, where the pages that matter for Ixolo live, and where to look when a page is missing.

Reading pages on the system

The pages come in the minix-man installation set and live under /usr/man. The ISO has carried that set since June 2026 (PR #165). Before then man found nothing on the live CD. setup extracts every set on the CD, so an installed system has the pages too (with the workaround for its amd64 path bug).

man ls                 # a page, from the first section that has it
man 8 minix-service    # a page from a given section
man -k filesystem      # search names and descriptions (same as apropos)
whatis tmpfs           # one-line description

man -k, apropos and whatis read the database /usr/man/whatis.db, which the build generates. If you add pages by hand, rebuild it with makewhatis /usr/man. Pages are formatted by mandoc; the rules are in /etc/man.conf.

The sections

Section	Holds	Pages in `minix-man`
1	User commands: `ls`, `sh`, `ssh`, `free`	about 410
2	System calls	86
3	Library functions, including libc, curses and OpenSSL	about 3,300
4	Devices and drivers	18
5	File formats: `fstab`, `rc.conf`, `system.conf`, `boot.cfg`	66
6	Games	25
7	Miscellany: `hier`, `man`, `pkgsrc`	31
8	System administration: `setup`, `minix-service`, `ifconfig`	about 160
9	Kernel interfaces	6

The counts come from the set list distrib/sets/lists/minix-man/mi on devel. Most of section 3 is OpenSSL’s API.

Pages specific to Ixolo

Most commands and libraries come from NetBSD and keep NetBSD’s pages. The pages below describe parts that are MINIX’s own, or new in Ixolo. Each one links to its source in the tree.

Services and boot

Page	What it covers
`minix-service(8)`	Start, stop, restart, refresh and update system services (servers and drivers) through the reincarnation server (RS).
`system.conf(5)`	`/etc/system.conf`: what each service may do (IPC targets, kernel calls, I/O ports, IRQs).
`service(8)`	Not the same thing: NetBSD’s tool to run `/etc/rc.d` scripts.
`boot.cfg(5)`	The boot menu file read by the BIOS boot loader.
`update_bootcfg(8)`	Regenerate the boot menu configuration.
`sysenv(1)`	Read the boot parameters the kernel was started with.
`svrctl(1)`, `svrctl(2)`	Special control calls to PM and VFS.

The services guide shows these in use.

Installation, disks and file systems

Page	What it covers
`setup(8)`	The installer. The page is old: it still talks about Pentiums, 16 MB of RAM and IDE-only disks. The install guide is current.
`mkfs.mfs(1)`	Create an MFS file system. MFS version 4 with a journal is the default; `-3` makes the old version 3.
`fsck.mfs(1)`	Check and repair MFS.
`tmpfs(8)`	The in-memory file system: `mount -t tmpfs`, the `size=` and `nr_inodes=` options, and its use for POSIX shared memory on `/var/shm`. New in Ixolo.
`part(8)`, `autopart(8)`	Partition editors used by `setup`.
`btrace(8)`	Block-level I/O tracing.
`fbdctl(8)`	Rules for the faulty block device, a driver that injects disk errors for testing.

Network and security

Page	What it covers
`netconf(8)`	Configure the network interactively; writes `/etc/ifconfig.<if>`.
`unix(8)`	The UNIX domain socket service (UDS).
`certctl(8)`	Manage the TLS trust anchors in `/etc/openssl/certs`. Imported from NetBSD-current.

Inspecting the system

Page	What it covers
`free(1)`	Free and used physical memory. New in Ixolo.
`lspci(1)`	List PCI devices.
`trace(1)`	Print a process’s system calls and signals. It uses `ptrace(2)`, which still has known failures on amd64 (test 42).
`hier(7)`	The file system layout.

NetBSD’s pages as a reference

Most of the userland and libc come from NetBSD, at different versions: some parts were resynced to NetBSD 10, others come from NetBSD-current, and a few are older. When a page is missing here, NetBSD’s online manual is the next best source:

https://man.netbsd.org/ (for example https://man.netbsd.org/kqueue.2)

Treat those pages as a guide, not a contract. The kernel, the servers and much of the system call layer are MINIX’s own, so behaviour can differ. Two examples: kqueue(2) here supports the read, write, vnode, timer and user filters but not the signal, process and AIO filters; and mlock(2) checks its arguments but does not pin pages. When in doubt, the system call reference and the POSIX page say what Ixolo does, and the source is the final word.