[TUHS] Mach for i386 / Mt Xinu or other

[clemc@ccc.com (Clem Cole)]

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Yes.  In fact, the CMU's Mach/386 code base became the direct start for
OSF/1 both the full (RI) and embedded uK (aka monolithic or mK) versions as
well.  The later would seed DEC Tru64 after being ported to the Alpha, but
the 386 version of the mK would become Apple's Darwin.  The RI (uK) version
is what we used for the Intel Paragon.   Anything called OSF/1 version 4 or
later is based on the RI.  Before that's probably mK, but you should check
the readme to see which base.

The joke, of course, was that microKernel, was not that micro (it was
greater than 1-1.5M and used to run these on 4M 386 systems).   It was cool
and the research version (pure uK) is very slick and has a lot of
interesting ideas.  I think it's interesting to note that we did all of the
core TNC development for the Paragon which was on i860 processor, on
desktop 386 systems with ethernets to simulate the fabric in the
supercomputer.

OSF/1 uK technology worked very well, in fact; it worked so well AT&T's
replacement for SVR4 was announced to be based on Chorus, which was a
European rewrite using a different uKernel technology specifically to
counter OSF/1.

Anyway, if you do a little hunting around the archives, it is quite
available.   Note it will want to boot from either a floppy for a hard
drive, as USB had yet to be created, so bootstrapping on more modern
hardware might be take a little work.   But it should work.   A number of
us that worked with it, are still findable and few lurk on this list.

As a side note, during the OSF/UI wars, I made a plea with the late Roger
Gourd (then VP of Eng at OSF) and some of the folks management team at OSF
to make the OSF/1 generally available for the 386. At time,  Linux was
still in the .9 stages booting & installing from a 20-40 floppy disks, but
still lacked networking and window system. 386BSD/FreeBSD was coming along
but not quite reached its stride.  The AT&T/BSDi case had just been
completed so the UNIX IP question has been settled. I could not convince
them it was of any value and to an extent it would have been competing with
their members (HP, DEC et al).

I've something thought that was a real opportunity lost.

On Fri, Feb 17, 2017 at 6:30 AM, <jsteve at superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote:

> While testing a crazy project I wanted to get working I came across this
> ancient link:
>
>
>
> http://altavista.superglobalmegacorp.com/usenet/b182/comp/os/mach/542.txt
>
>
>
> --------8<--------8<--------8<--------8<
>
>
>
> Newsgroups: comp.os.mach
>
> Subject: Mach for i386 - want to beta?
>
> Message-ID: <1364 at mtxinu.UUCP>
>
> Date: 2 Oct 90 17:12:19 GMT
>
> Reply-To: scherrer at mtxinu.COM (Deborah Scherrer)
>
> Organization: mt Xinu, Berkeley
>
> Lines: 24
>
>
>
> Mt Xinu is currently finishing up its release of 2.6 MSD for the i386.
>
> 2.6 MSD is a CMU-funded standard distribution of the Mach kernel,
>
> release-engineered with the following:
>
>                 2.5 Mach kernel, with NFS & BSD-tahoe enhancements
>
>                 Transarc's AFS
>
>                 X11R4
>
>                 most of the 4.3-tahoe BSD release
>
>                 Andrew Tool Kit
>
>                 Camelot transaction processing system
>
>                 Cornell's ISIS distributed programming environment
>
>                 most of the FSF utilities
>
>                 a few other nifty things
>
>
>
> --------8<--------8<--------8<--------8<
>
>
>
> Was any of this stuff ever saved?  I know on the CSRG CD there is some
> buried source for Mach 2.5 although I haven’t seen anything on where to
> even start to compile it, how or even how to boot it...  I know Mach is
> certainly not fast, nor all that ‘small’ but it’d be interesting to see a
> 4.3BSD on a PC!
>
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