[SunRescue] any 3B2 users out there?

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Thu, 22 Mar 2001, Greg A. Woods wrote:

> That's a good question.  Google finds threads in various lists hinting
> that there was a CMU port of Mach 2.5 to sparc, but that it's probably
> encumbered.  Original CMU Mach 3.0 requires a SunOS/3 source license.
> 
> The Mach project at CMU has been shut down, but there's Mach 4 at Utah.
> 
> Your best bet is the GNU Hurd -- aka the GNU Mach kernel.  It's not on
> sparc yet though as far as I can see.

There also is 4.4BSD Lite (a simple single server BSD on Mach) and the
xMach project (about to make a stable release).  xMach looks fairly
promising actually.  The only problem is it doesn't yet support the
platform I want it to (DECstation, a nice r3k platform).  All these
projects have a lot of appeal to me because of the Mach connection.
Haven't actually tried any of them though.

I'm not a microkernel purist so much as I'm interested in the idea of
being able to use mach as a basis for a new OS.  Hurd is even better
because it already is an OS, but I can jetison the parts I don't like
easily (like the file systems).  

It seems that all OS projects are split into two catagories.  There is
that category that is doing it because they can (I suspect that xMach fits
into this category) and there is the category of server OSs.  I want to
see more work on OSs for end users.  The problem is that the type of
people who would be interested in such OSs aren't the type of people that
like low level hardware twiddling.  Don't know if I'll ever try such a
project.  So many other things to do.

--
Joshua Boyd