Thor Lancelot Simon said:

>Uh, no.  Not any more than the NextStep kernel was "basically a modified
>4.3BSD".

>There's plenty of FreeBSD code in there, but don't kid yourself; OS X is
>Mach.

I guess their choice of Mach was primarily because they already had the
expertise from NextStep. They lose some performance this way, but they
were able to get the OS out sooner. If Apple keeps upgrading their
processors on a similar timeline to IBM, then the Mach lack of performance
will eventually not matter any more. ( see True 64 UNIX on Alpha )

The fact is that NetBSD and Linux are both faster on Apple hardware, but
Apple is working to get the traditional application interface into OS X.

I still remember the original NextStep 68030 boxes. Interesting, but but slow.

Originally, OSF developed OSF/1 on i486DX boxes. It was fairly fast, but was
slower than SCO UNIX and ISC UNIX on similar boxes.

I see that the Opengroup is now working on an OS called ADS, which seems to
actually use the original premise of Mach, which was to distribute a workload
across multiple servers, rather than the "single server" implementations that
one usually sees.

-- 
Rick Kelly  rmk@rmkhome.com  www.rmkhome.com