# <a name="Table_of_Contents"> Table of Contents </a>

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# <a name="Early_beginnings"> Early beginnings </a>

GNUMach 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-mach version of GNU Mach was presented in November 1999 by Roland McGrath. <http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/bug-hurd/1999-November/003554.html> The purpose of the port was to get better hardware support through new drivers and platform code available in the OSKit.

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.

# <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 (&gt;= 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.

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.

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Copyright (C) 2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111, USA

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.

-- [[Main/JoachimNilsson]] - 24 Oct 2002