Despite Linux' strong support for various CPU architectures, including MMU-less systems and real-time capabilities, as monolithic design Linux is still kind of vulnerable at least in regard of programming mistakes. For example dereferencing bad pointers, out of bounds array access are able to crash the whole kernel. Imperfect loop conditions, e.g. in combination of unexpected hardware conditions can also result in infinite loops and thus stall the whole system.

This is where Minix as an open source implementation of micro-kernel shines with self healing capabilities such as reloading crashed or unresponsive driver processes.

However at the time of writing Minix only supports x86 CPUs, while ports to PowerPC and ARM are in progress. The minimal size of the bare microsystem kernel however could potentially decrease the amount of work required for new architecture ports as well as the isolated driver process model decrease the edit-compile cycle during device driver development.