On Wed, 5 Apr 2000, Leimy wrote:
> Mach based BSD? I thought it was a microkernel.... I wasn't sure though.
> What does this mean for the HURD?
Mach is the microkernel (based on 3.0 I believe). The BSD/Darwin part is
very likely just a mach single server like Lites and mkLinux (but I
haven't looked at it closely yet).
As far as Hurd is concerned, I don't know .... I remember once reading a
paper somewhere that Hurd was built on top of a Mach 4.0 derived source,
and this was because the older 3.0 source had short comings which would
have made it difficult to work with (someone please correct me if I am
wrong).
If hurd can in fact be ported/run on to of a mach 3.0 based kernel, then I
think a switch to the mach/darwin microkernel would be a big win (but that
task might be very hard or impossible, and of course the licensing would
have to be reviewed in detail). The Gnu/Linux/BSD crowd could leverage
their skills for Intel device drivers (which would ultimately help Darwin
succeed on Intel) and Apple would provide a PPC microkernal port with
device drivers which Hurd could utilize for an easy PPC port.
But somewhere I remember GNU having a big problem with Apple (hmm, was it
the old MS vs. Apple look-n-feel thing) and don't know if they have
forgiven them yet ;)
Dunno, just my $.02
-- jim
