Newsgroups: comp.os.mach,comp.os.misc,comp.parallel,comp.sys.powerpc
From: qli@sunrise.scu.edu (Qiang Li)
Subject: Mach/BSD-Unix for PowerMac
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 1995 18:58:55 GMT
Message-ID: <9502161520.AA23145@sunrise.scu.edu>

As a part of our research on the Local Area MultiProcessor (LAMP) at Santa
Clara University, we have been porting Mach/BSD-Unix to the Power
Macintosh. This work has been supported by Apple Computer and the National
Science Foundation, and the Mach project group at CMU has been very
helpful.

LAMP is a closely coupled distributed system featuring shared physical
memory and cache coherence among remote machines. The goal is to build high
performance scalable systems from inexpensive microcomputers and
workstations.

We tentatively call our version of Mach "PMacMach". The porting started in
Summer'94 and has been carried out mainly by 3 graduate students in the
Computer Engineering Department. After long and painstaking effort, we
expect to boot the single-user mode in the next week or two. There is still
a lot of work ahead before the system will be stable, but the biggest
hurdle for bootstrapping the system is almost overcome.

The current version is set up to suit our research program, and at present
we have no plan to make a normal version for distribution. However, if
enough manpower and funding becomes available, we could make a distribution
version. Or, if there is sufficient demand or interest we could make our
research version available as a starting point for other porting efforts.


Qiang Li



 
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Dr. Qiang Li           Dept of Computer Engineering    Voice : 408-554-2730 
Assistant Professor    Santa Clara University          Fax   : 408-554-5474 
qli@sunrise.scu.edu    Santa Clara, CA 95053 
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