The Design and Implementation of laffer1

The MACH kernel is an interesting read...

Here's a description of the MACH kernel usage for NeXT.

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/mach/public/FAQ/NeXT.release

Subject: NeXT release of Mach
Date: Jan 3, 1991
----------------------------------------------------------------

Avie Tevanian of NeXT writes:

NeXT started with the Mach 2.0 sources and have picked up most of the
Mach 2.5 and beyond kernel fixes, except for external pagers.
The NeXT environment includes all of Unix and goes well beyond
supporting object oriented programs and lots of fancy graphics.

It is possible to get the machine-independent kernel sources as
well as all the library and environment sources from NeXT. Only
the machine-dependent sources such as device drivers are unavailable.

-------------------------------------------------------------

From Carrick Talmadge
clt@physics.purdue.edu

The latest NeXT price lists reportedly shows:

N5515 NeXT 2.0 Mach Source Release on Floppies $10,000
[$5000 for educational institutions].

I am led to understand that this includes the various licensing fees.

The MACH kernel went through several development forks from the CMU projects.

We have MACH 4 (UNIV of UTAH) and the LITES project from UNIV OF HELSINKI. Basically that just booted the Mach 4 development kernel on a FreeBSD 2.x userland and partition table.
http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/mach4-i386/html/UK02p21-release.html

MACH 3 and lower of course.. original work
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/mach/public/www/FAQ.html

GNU Mach along with GNU/HURD...
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/gnumach.html

Debian GNU/HURD distro
http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install
http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-cd
(available on FTP) http://na.hurd.gnuab.org/pub/debian-cd/K8/

Of course there was the NeXT and now darwin/opendarwin implementations.

One thing of interest so far is the reference to single server vs multiserver mach kernels. GNU Mach is a multiserver kernel which appears to run multiple services to service requests. It seems similar possibly to dragonflybsd's abstraction but a little more so.

Well the GNU hurd kernel's lack of hardware support is another thorn in my side. :)

I'll look at alternatives lol.

I ordered the parts to build a UNIX file server. Caryn and I have been talking about how we miss the old IBM file server we had. It was an aptiva running NT4 server.

Our new file server will contain the following

AMD semptron 2300+
MSI motherboard with nforce2 chipset
onboard 10/100 nic, audio (5.1)
ATI FireGL 8800 chipset video AGP 8x 64mb
2 80 gig WD SATA 8mb buffer hdd
RAID 0 config (sata raid controller on MB)
cd burner
256mb corsair pc2700 memory
Antec case wtih 350 watt quiet power supply

I'll set it up with FreeBSD 5.4 release (or beta if its still not out)

I'll run samba, cups and cvsd along with SSH/SFTP

For kicks i'll setup Wolfenstein and XORG with DRI enabled along with a window manager. Probably gnome 2.10 or wmaker.

I was between this and a mac mini. This way i get raid (hardware or software depending how it goes) and the drives are bigger. Of course its larger and louder and can't play WOW lol.

Oh and we upgraded our other two desktops. Caryn's getting a Radeon 9800 AGP 4x 128mb for her Mac (has an nvidia geforce 4mx 32mb now) and i am getting a 16x DL 4x DVD burner for the dell.