Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!tness7!texbell!bigtex!milano!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!encore!bzs@xenna
From: bzs@xenna (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: PCWeek on Mach
Message-ID: <3958@encore.UUCP>
Date: 22 Oct 88 22:42:12 GMT
References: <12670003@eecs.nwu.edu> <1022@fai.UUCP>
Sender: news@encore.UUCP
Reply-To: bzs@xenna (Barry Shein)
Organization: Encore Computer Corp
Lines: 28
In-reply-to: ronc@fai.UUCP (Ronald O. Christian)

>In article <12670003@eecs.nwu.edu> gore@eecs.nwu.edu (Jacob Gore) writes:
>>	Other features include Mach (an operating system based on
>>	Unix System V) ...
>
>That's because if you don't have those magic words "System V" on
>the package, none of the MBA's that make all the *real* decisions
>will pay attention.
>
>
>				Ron

I can assure you that Mach is *not* based on SystemV, it's based upon
BSD4.3. Unless NeXT has done work I am not aware of (entirely
possible!) it's probably not quite SysV compliant.

To most users Mach is indistinguishable from BSD4.3, the Mach features
are either a proper superset (new syscalls) or have been integrated
transparently (eg. a new stdio uses mapped files which improves
performance, but from the call interface level it's not apparent
anything different is going on.) A simple shell script to extend paths
gets one into the entire Mach environment for commands and compiling
etc.

As people have mentioned, most binaries from 4.xbsd systems of the
same flavor run on Mach (I've found this to be true) and sources
should port trivially, even with 4.3'isms built in.

	-Barry Shein, ||Encore||