Hi all,
	I thought I'd pass this along since I thought this is a very interesting news. If in fact that the mach kernel is not in anyway restricted by Apple license, it might be interesting to sort of think about Mach kernel + NetBSD unix server running on top. I have seen Mac Mach running IIci woth color X-window before and it is pretty nice. This shows that device drivers have been written for the mach kernel. Any comments?


						- Nico -

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As a part of our research on the Local Area MultiProcessor (LAMP) at Santa
Clara University, we have been porting Mach/BSD-Unix to the Power
Macintosh. This work has been supported by Apple Computer and the National
Science Foundation, and the Mach project group at CMU has been very
helpful.

LAMP is a closely coupled distributed system featuring shared physical
memory and cache coherence among remote machines. The goal is to build high
performance scalable systems from inexpensive microcomputers and
workstations.

We tentatively call our version of Mach "PMacMach". The porting started in
Summer'94 and has been carried out mainly by 3 graduate students, namely
Yongchen Miao (group leader), Huan He, and Yehchen Fu, in the Computer
Engineering Department, with help from other students. After long and
painstaking effort, we have been able to boot the single-user mode and
execute external commands from the Unix shell. There is still a lot of work
ahead before the system will be stable, but the biggest hurdle for
bootstrapping the system is almost overcome.

The current version is set up to suit our research program, and at present
we have no plan to make a normal version for distribution. However, if
enough manpower and funding becomes available, we could make a distribution
version. Or, if there is sufficient demand or interest we could make our
research version available as a starting point for other porting efforts.


Qiang Li

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Prof. Qiang Li
Dept. of Computer Engineering
Santa Clara University
Santa Clara, CA 95053

qli@sunrise.scu.edu
phone: (408)554-2730
fax: (408)554-5474
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