Subject: Re: NetBSD-Mach?
To: The Great Mr. Kurtz [David A. Gatwood] <davagatw@mars.utm.edu>
From: Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@loki.stanford.edu>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 12/09/1996 17:32:37
> 
> On Mon, 9 Dec 1996, Jason Thorpe 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?
> > 
> > Actually porting NetBSD to Mach would be almost pointless.  NetBSD is
> > a standalone kernel.  A better approach is to port NetBSD to the hardware,
> > possibly using some code from Mach.
> 
> That makes sense, but if the Mach Microkernel is available on a platform,
> it certainly makes for a quick port after the initial coding (i.e. porting
> to future platforms that support Mach3 would simply involve a recompile,
> and I suspect the mach3 platform list will grow very quickly for this
> reason.)   Also, the ability of Mach to run multiple servers would, in
> theory, allow one to basically run two OS'es side-by-side, for instance
> Linux and NetBSD... or eventually... MacOS and NetBSD.

Hmm. I think you're both right. I want to see (and will help with when
time and owned hardware permits) a standalone port of NetBSD to the PPC
macs. But I think a port to Mach would be interesting too, for three
reasons. 1) I _think_ it could happen faster than a stand-alone port
(I could be wrong), 2) it quickly ports us to hardware we don't support
but mach does, and 3) it's the extreme extension of NetBSD's support of
the indiginous OS. Here's an example where you can run NetBSD AT THE
SAME TIME AS YOUR NATIVE OS, if your native OS is mach 3.0 based.
True, I'm not saying we'll now be ported to the whole world, but it's
a cool idea. :-)

And the MacOS idea might not be too far fetched. MacOS 8 will (someday)
run on a microkernel, so adding Mach-esque hooks might happen. I
bet all the mkLinux folks would dig it, enough to get Apple to do it.
We could then just ride that wave. :-)

Take care,

Bill