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| -rw-r--r-- | Mach/MachHistory.mdwn | 12 |
1 files changed, 10 insertions, 2 deletions
diff --git a/Mach/MachHistory.mdwn b/Mach/MachHistory.mdwn index 4e5e44b9..d108225b 100644 --- a/Mach/MachHistory.mdwn +++ b/Mach/MachHistory.mdwn @@ -22,6 +22,8 @@ In 1989 CMU decided to revamp Mach. They removed the bloat and put the UNIX emul Later on support for Mach 3.0 at CMU vaned and the project was taken over by the University of Utah. The FLUX group started the Mach4 project. An ambitious project which included complete rewrite of the x86 support code and integration of Linux 2.0 drivers. That's right, Linux awoke around 1991 so this makes it apx. 1994. +# <a name="GNU_Mach_and_OSKit_Mach"> </a> GNU Mach and OSKit-Mach + GNU Mach is based on Mach4 from University of Utah, which in turn is based on Mach3 from Carnegie-Mellon University. The last release of Mach4 was the [UK22 release](http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/mach4-i386/html/mach4-UK22.html). The OSKit was what evolved when the Mach4 project at University of Utah was dropped. The people involved wanted to reuse the work they had put into Mach in the form of hardware support and drivers. @@ -30,13 +32,19 @@ The oskit-mach version of GNU Mach was presented in November 1999 by Roland McGr On May 27 2002, after the Gnumach 1.3 release, Roland McGrath merged OSKit-Mach onto the HEAD of CVS making it the Gnumach 2.x mainline. +Meanwhile, OSKit became unmaintained, thus posing more of a burden on than being helpful in GNU Mach development. Consequently, as of March 2006, nobody is working on OSKit Mach, or trying to use it. + +In 2005 Gianluca Guida started a different attempt to use the osenv interface with minimal changes to GNU Mach 1.x, thus allowing use of the generic driver interface while importing as little of the umaintained OSKit code as possible. However, there turned out to be serious problems with OSKit, so this attempt was abandoned as well. + +Today, GNU Mach development focuses on the 1.x branch again -- see also [[GNUMachRevivalProject]]. + # <a name="Status_of_the_project"> Status of the project </a> GNU Mach 1.3 was released in May 2002, and features advanced boot script support, support for large disks (>= 10GB) and an improved console. -GNU Mach is used as the default microkernel in the GNU/Hurd system. It is compatible with other popular Mach distributions. The device drivers for block devices and network cards are taken from Linux 2.0.x kernel versions, and so a broad range of common hardware is supported. +GNU Mach is used as the default microkernel in the GNU/Hurd system. It is compatible with other popular Mach distributions. The device drivers for block devices and network cards are taken from Linux 2.0.x kernel versions (plus some backports of more recent drivers), so most newer hardware is not supported. -However, the Linux device drivers have been improved greatly since the 2.0.x version, and a new version of GNU Mach based on the OSKit library is being worked on, which uses newer drivers and in general has cleaner machine specific support code. +As of March 2006 a GNU Mach 1.4 release is planned, focusing on code cleanup. It is meant to serve as a starting point for more radical future changes while maintaining 1.4.x as a stable branch. ---- |