On Mon, 9 Dec 1996 17:32:37 -0800 (PST), wrstuden@loki.stanford.edu (Bill  
Studenmund) wrote:
> 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. :-)

1)  The initial port will not be faster because you have to port Mach mk and  
mutilate the
NetBSD kernel in order to run on Mach mk's.

2)  .. doubtful.  What hardware are you talking about?  What it really makes  
easier and better is porting to new platforms not supported by freely  
available source and multiprocessing support.

3) You cannot just simply slap any OS on top of Mach.  You need to have  
access to the source, or reengineer the wheel, and build an OS server.

You really should check out emulation library Mach-US.

> 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. :-)

Just because something runs on a mk, doesn't mean it is neccessarily a Mach  
mk that it is running on, and binary versions of OS' do not just run on top of  
a Mach mk because they're mk based.  Everything I've ever seen required  
access to the OS sources, which you most likely won't have.

--
Christian Kuhtz          kuhtz@ix.netcom.com - hm, ckuhtz@paranet.com - wk
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