Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!bionet!agate!ucbvax!mtxinu!scherrer
From: scherrer@mtxinu.COM (Deborah Scherrer)
Newsgroups: comp.os.mach
Subject: Mach distribution
Message-ID: <942@mtxinu.UUCP>
Date: 22 Aug 89 20:00:25 GMT
Reply-To: scherrer@mtxinu.COM (Deborah Scherrer)
Organization: mt Xinu, Berkeley
Lines: 47

As Rick Rashid mentioned in a recent  posting,  mt  Xinu  is
working with Carnegie Mellon to provide a standard distribu-
tion of CMU's Mach and its related software  environment  to
the  educational  and  technical  community.   Because  this
release is funded and arranged under  a  contract  with  CMU
(and  DARPA), it is not designed to be a commercial product,
but rather a source distribution similar in scope and  pric-
ing to the Berkeley BSD releases.

The  CMU  contract  specifies  that  mt  Xinu  will  expand,
develop,  release-engineer,  and  distribute  CMU's research
version  of  Mach.   There  will  be  (at  least)  2  yearly
releases,  with  the  first  targeted for late January.  The
first release will be based on Mach  2.5  and  will  include
Sun's  NFS  (as integrated into Mach by NeXT); the 4.3/Tahoe
interface,  environment,  and  utilities;  Tahoe  TCP/IP
improvements;  and  BSD disk labels.  A subsequent distribu-
tion will most likely include support for the POSIX 1003.1
interface, as well as ANSI C support.

In addition to  Mach,  the  distribution  will  include  the
Andrew  File  System, Andrew Tool Kit, XWindows, the Camelot
transaction processing system,  Cornell's  ISIS  distributed
programming  environment,  some  FSF  utilities,  and  other
related software of interest to the research community.

The platforms to be supported on the  January  1990  release
include
            DEC Vaxes
            IBM RT PC
            Sun 3s
Additional platforms being  considered  for  later  releases
include PMAX, 386, and Mac II.

mt Xinu is working closely with Rick and  other  researchers
at  CMU  to  assure  that new features are available for the
release as soon as possible.

Although the pricing is desired to be roughly  akin  to  BSD
pricing,  there  will be required royalties to SUN and Tran-
sarc (for  AFS).   An  AT&T  source  license  will  also  be
required.   Other  licenses (Sun NFS, etc.) will (hopefully)
be bundled into mt Xinu's license,  to  make  it  simple  to
obtain the distribution.

For more information on the distribution, contact:
        mtxinu-mach@mtxinu.com