Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!bellcore!texbell!sugar!ficc!karl
From: karl@ficc.uu.net (karl lehenbauer #)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: My ramblings on the NeXT machine
Summary: Mach isn't incompatible with Sys V
Message-ID: <2330@ficc.uu.net>
Date: 30 Nov 88 16:44:42 GMT
References: <26812@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <27965@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <4501@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Distribution: na
Organization: Ferranti International Controls
Lines: 33

> >>	They have no particular plan to adopt a "standard" UNIX.

> Bob Sutterfield writes:
> >Why bother, when Mach has technical advantages?  Besides, as your ""s
> >imply, there's no such thing (yet) as a standard UNIX, much as some
> >parties might like to define theirs as one.

In article <4501@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>, caromero@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (C. Antonio Romero) writes:
> Well, everything I've heard has suggested that they're not really
> married to Mach, believe it or not... at a demo I saw the
> marketing type gave the impression that if there were enough pressure
> for a SysV.4 Unix, or something like that, it might be offered.

Well, Mach is really nothing more (or less) than an OS kernel providing 
multitasking, memory management and interprocess communications.  Efforts 
are under way at CMU to move 4.3 BSD out of the kernel.  Then other operating 
systems could be ported to run under Mach, gaining Mach's machine-independent
virtual memory management and multiprocessing capabilities as well as the
potential of greater concurrency in the OS (since a lot of stuff that used to 
be in the monolithic kernel now runs as separate tasks, and the thread
implementation of lightweight processes enables these programs to be written
to have even more concurrency.  

The point is that there is nothing incompatible between Mach and System V per 
se.  System V extensions could be added to Mach.  I would be very, very
surprised if NeXT abandoned Mach, since it provides their machines the 
capability to transparently run programs on other Next machines on a
network and the eventual ability to add more CPU boards to your Next machine
and have Mach transparently make use of them by dispatching tasks on a
"most favorable CPU" basis.
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