FYI: "FSF work on a GNU OS" posted to comp.arch

[Alex S. Crain]

I'm pretty sure that curtis said these things...

>We have Mach 3.0 code here.  Note that this is NOT the version with BSD
>wedged into the kernel.
>
>Kernel source alone is about 100,000 lines of code.  This does not include
>any of the machine-specific sections, which can be quite large; for example,
>the i386 machine-specific code is 40,000 lines.

	[...]

>I can't quote a source on this, but I believe I remember a discussion -
>maybe in comp.arch - initiated by a shocked reader who booted Mach on his
>386 and found it was 300k.

	[...]

somebody else said..
>>> The other factor to note is that this is _very_ heavy vaporware.

	Ho hum, ho hum. I've been fooling around with this (conceptually 
anyway) and I have some thoughts.

	[1] Mach is certainly not vaporware, I have the sources in front
of me now. They don't include a 68k port, but they are free and availble
for 386 and mips architectures.

	[2] I think that mach plus the unix layer would be pointless on
the unixpc, (a) because its big and (b) because of the time involved to
make it as stable as the unixpc kernel. Mostly (b).

	I think that people don't appreciate the unixpc kernel for what it
is. My machine is up for weeks/monthes at a time, the documentation is
pretty good, and for the most part, it works as advertised. The few bugs
there are are well known at this point, and somebody on this group can
tell you almost anything that you want to know about the box. Say that
about zenix, Microport or any of a dozen competing systems (tried to
support an Ardent titan lately?) The software is getting dated, but
there's a good C compiler, debugger and editor availabe, and modern graphics
is too heavy for our hardware anyway.

	[3] None the less, I think that mach is intreaging, because it
provides a way to run something other then unix on this machine. I'm 
thinking standalone programs here, something thats developed under unix
and runs in place of the unix kernel.

	There already is one solution available, the diagnostics disk. I've
been running standalone programs the link to the diagnostics code for
awhile, but its very grody and undocumented. 

	Mach is pretty big, but its also segmented well, so it can be run
without some of the modules (like the networking drivers, and the debugger,
and a few other things). A flat file system that would run in a disk partition
would be easy to code, and most of the drivers could be based on what
comes with the diagnostics disk code.

	So anyway, I might try and bring it up this summer if I can
find time. It shouldn't take too long, and I'd be happy to share the 
effort if someone was interested. Of course, I may never get time, in
which case someone else should do it :-). But I think that its a really
good idea.




	


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#################################		           :alex.
#Disclaimer: Anyone who agrees  #                 Systems Programmer
#with me deserves what they get.#    University of Maryland Baltimore County
#################################	    alex at umbc3.umbc.edu