Subject: Re: notes from Apple's World Wide Developers' Conference, May 1999
To: Erik Fair <fair@clock.org>
From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@mipsys.com>
List: port-macppc
Date: 06/15/1999 15:22:29
On Mon, Jun 14, 1999, Erik Fair <fair@clock.org> wrote:

>There is an internal war going on between the MacOS weenies and the NeXT
>weenies. Unfortunately, since Steve Jobs is CEO, and Avie Tevanian is CTO,
>the NeXT weenies win the arguments unless the market obviously dictates
>otherwise. MacOS X (formerly Rhapsody, NeXT, etc.) is essentially Mach 2.5
>underneath, with all the old UNIX warts that will be difficult to deal with
>(little support for hot-swap devices or real-time performance in
>multi-media or user interface), plus they have to re-educate the NeXT
>weenies about the requirements of the desktop/laptoy market that Apple
>lives on. It's going to be interesting to watch this from a distance.
>
>MK/Linux is Mach 3.0, but with everyone at Apple being busy with MacOS X,
>support for this software is basically gone. I'd say, grab the sources
>while they're still available online to use as a reference for those
>PowerPC machines we don't yet support (e.g. the older NuBus machines and
>non-OF PowerBooks).

To my knowledge, Mach 2.5 is a temporary kernel, MacOS X final should be
based on a modified version of Mach 3.0 with IOKit bringing hot-swap, RT
perfs, etc...). Also, the current plans are to have this new kernel in
Open Source too.