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Introduction to GNU MachGNU Mach is the microkernel of the GNU system. A microkernel provides only a limited functionality, just enough abstraction on top of the hardware to run the rest of the operating system in user space. The GNU Hurd servers and the GNU C library implement the POSIX compatible base of the GNU system on top of the microkernel architecture provided by Mach. Currently, GNU Mach runs on IA32 machines. GNU Mach should, and probably will, be ported to other hardware architectures in the future. Mach was ported to many operating systems in the past. GNU Mach is maintained by the Hurd developers for the GNU project. If you need help with GNU Mach or want to contribute to the development of the microkernel, you should contact the Hurd people. Advantages of GNU MachGNU Mach is not the most advanced microkernel known to the planet, nor is it the fastest or smallest, but it has a rich set of interfaces and some features which make it useful as the base of the Hurd system.
Status of the projectGNU Mach 1.3 was released in May 2002, and features advanced boot script support, support for large disks (>= 10GB) and an improved console. GNU Mach is used as the default microkernel in the GNU/Hurd system. It is compatible with other popular Mach distributions. The device drivers for block devices and network cards are taken from Linux 2.0.x kernel versions, and so a broad range of common hardware is supported. However, the Linux device drivers have been improved greatly since the 2.0.x version, and a new version of GNU Mach based on the OSKit library is being worked on, which uses newer drivers and in general has cleaner machine specific support code. |
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Updated: $Date: 2005/10/02 11:27:11 $ $Author: ams $