Continuation of the Mach Microkernel

[Antony T Curtis]

On Mon, 2005-01-24 at 20:46 -0800, Justin Walker wrote:
> On Jan 24, 2005, at 19:50, Andrew Reilly wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, Jan 21, 2005 at 04:51:51PM -0500, Nicholas Ink wrote:
> >> 	Has anyone tried running the Mach microkernel with a new version of
> >> FreeBSD, like 5.x?  I'm working on a project involving that
> >> microkernel, but I'm concerned that it won't work with newer versions
> >> of FreeBSD.
> >> 	Does anyone know anything or know of any resources that might assist
> >> me?
> >
> > How about the Darwin codebase?  They recently upgraded their
> > user-land to FreeBSD 5.something, I believe.
> 
> Nope.  The Darwin kernel uses some updates from FreeBSD 4.x, not 5.x.  
> It isn't a wholesale import of FreeBSD, though.  The device driver 
> model is completely different, as is the interface between the network 
> stacks and the devices.
> 
> Also, just to be clear, Darwin doesn't use Mach as a microkernel.  The 
> implementation is more like Mach 2.x than Mac 3.x (even though the Mach 
> bits are based on Mach 3.x): there is no support for running "guest 
> OSs" in Darwin.

There was a project someone had called something like MachBSD or xBSD
which had a Mach microkernel and a FreeBSD 4.x userland - it had a
project goal to reimplement FreeBSD but with a Mach-based kernel. The
site disappeared sometime last year - it had a couple of ISOs but didn't
have complete source online IIRC.

-- 
Antony T Curtis, BSc.                   UNIX, Linux, *BSD, Networking
antony.t.curtis at ntlworld.com            C++, J2EE, Perl, MySQL, Apache
                                        IT Consultancy.