On Tue, 10 Dec 1996, Christian Kuhtz wrote:

> On Mon, 9 Dec 1996 13:55:55 -0600 (CST), "The Great Mr. Kurtz [David A. Gatwood]" <davagatw@Mars.utm.edU> wrote:
> > 1.	Is anyone working on/planning to work on a port of NetBSD to
> > Mach3?
> 
> I've been messing around with various Mach mk's on the black NeXT
> hardware -- as a distraction from the NetBSD hacking. ;-)
> 
> Mach3 is a possibility, however, I would very much favor Mach4 instead of it.  Mach4 is
> predominantly Mach-UX and not Mach-US, though.

Well, I'm looking at Mach3 for the sole reason that there's a Mach3
microkernel that runs on the PowerMacs and that's the target platform I'm
aiming for (Both Nubus and PCI).

> Depending on the Mach mk architecture you chose, you can replace all
> the above and much more by calls to Mach servers (which sit somewhat
> underneath the OS servers for discussion sake).

With a little code to convert the format, of course.  That's the idea.

> > And yes, I'm looking at the NetBSD sources right now.  I've kinda come to
> > the conclusion that the biggest pains would be in finding a way to start
> > it from mach, and in finding a way to beta test without a second booting
> > MkLinux partition.  That and pounding the Linux ext2fs code in for obvious
> > reasons.
> 
> Look at the work at CMU, which is mostly Mach3, Lites by Johannes
> Helander (hope I got that right), and Mach4 at the University of Utah.


> However, Mach3 is basically no longer evolving.  Mach4 evolution has

Au contraire.  Since OSF began the MkLinux project, they've found the need
to change several things and there's still a whole list of things that are
"in the works" for the Microkernel (not just new drivers and stuff for the
PowerMacs, but evidently some other things as well.  Of course when those
books I printed (1993-1994) were written, things were in a much greater
state of flux, but supposedly they are taking several additional features
from Utah's Mach4, and vice-versa.  Of course those features probably
won't be usable for a while, but there is development.  I don't know about
evolution... the basic framework is not likely to change much or all the
servers would need to be rewritten (this happened once to a degree a few
months ago, but I think that was just because of a change in binary
formats).

Later,

 /---------------------------------------------------------------------\
|David A. Gatwood             And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,  |
|davagatw@mars              Went home and put a bullet through his head.|
|dgatwood@nyx.cs.du.edu              --Edwin Arlington Robinson         |
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