GNU Mach is an implementation of the

Mach microkernel Mach () is a kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University by Richard Rashid and Avie Tevanian to support operating system research, primarily distributed and parallel computing. Mach is often considered one of the earliest examples of a micr ...

. It is the default

microkernel In computer science, a microkernel (often abbreviated as μ-kernel) is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system (OS). These mechanisms include low-level address space management, ...

in the

GNU Hurd GNU Hurd is a collection of microkernel servers written as part of GNU, for the GNU Mach microkernel. It has been under development since 1990 by the GNU Project of the Free Software Foundation, designed as a replacement for the Unix kernel, and ...

. GNU Mach runs on

IA-32 IA-32 (short for "Intel Architecture, 32-bit", commonly called i386) is the 32-bit version of the x86 instruction set architecture, designed by Intel and first implemented in the 80386 microprocessor in 1985. IA-32 is the first incarnation o ...

machines. GNU Mach is maintained by developers on the GNU project. It is distributed under the terms of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

(GPL).

History

Early versions of the Hurd were developed on top of CMU's Mach 3.0. In 1994, CMU stopped working on Mach, and the GNU Project switched to the

University of Utah The University of Utah (U of U, UofU, or simply The U) is a public research university in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is the flagship institution of the Utah System of Higher Education. The university was established in 1850 as the University of De ...

's Mach 4. The kernel known as "GNU Mach" was derived from Mach 4 once Utah stopped development. The first ChangeLog entry by

Thomas Bushnell Thomas Bushnell, BSG, formerly known as Michael Bushnell (born December 13, 1967), is a software developer and Gregorian friar. He was the founder and principal architect of GNU's official kernel project, GNU Hurd. Bushnell was Hurd's official ...

(rather than by a Utah researcher) is from 16 December 1996. In 2002, Roland McGrath branched the OSKit-Mach branch from GNU Mach 1.2, intending to replace all the device drivers and some of the hardware support with code from OSKit. After the release of GNU Mach 1.3, this branch was intended to become the GNU Mach 2.0 main line; however, as of 2006, OSKit-Mach is not being developed due to lack of activity in OSKit itself. Around 2006, an attempt to replace

's kernel with the Coyotos kernel also ended in failure. GNU Mach 1.4 was released on 27 September 2013, eleven years after 1.3.

Version history

*Version 1.0 was released on 14 April 1997. *Version 1.1.1 was released on 12 May 1997. *Version 1.1.2 was released on 10 June 1997. *Version 1.1.3 was released on 12 June 1997. *Version 1.2 was released on 21 June 1999. *Version 1.3 was released on 27 May 2002, and features advanced boot script support, support for disks larger than 10 gigabytes and an improved

console Console may refer to: Computing and video games * System console, a physical device to operate a computer ** Virtual console, a user interface for multiple computer consoles on one device ** Command-line interface, a method of interacting with ...

. *Version 1.4 was released on 27 September 2013. *Version 1.5 was released on 10 April 2015. *Version 1.6 was released on 31 October 2015. *Version 1.7 was released on 18 May 2016. *Version 1.8 was released on 18 December 2016.

References

External links

*
The Mach 4 Project
from which GNU Mach was derived. {{DEFAULTSORT:Gnu Mach Mach Mach (kernel) Mach, Gnu de:GNU#Kernel