Work on the Mach operating system was started in 1985. Over the years the goals of the project have
included:
-
Providing interprocess communication fuctionality at the kernel level and using it as
a building block for the rest of the system.
-
Virtual memory support provided by the kernel and by user level servers.
-
Kernel level support for light-weight threads.
-
Support for closely and loosely coupled multi-processors and a variety of
different commercially available workstations.
-
Micro-kernel architecture limiting the functions supported by the micro-kernel and
enabling multiple user level servers to support various Application and Programming Interfaces
-
Maintaining at least one Unix-style API to enable the Mach system to support all the
everyday uses of the project members and other researchers.
-
Distributing this technology to other researchers and commercial sites to use as the
basis for further research or products.
At this time the project has mostly come to a close at CMU. Parts of the Mach Operating
system have been incorported in an number of commercial operating systems including:
-
Encore's Multimax
-
NeXT OS
-
MachTen for the Macintoshes
-
Omron's Luna
-
DEC's OSF/1 for the DEC Alpha
-
IBM's OS/2 for the RS6000 based machines.
Further research and development on Mach is being done by the Open Software
Foundation.
