Mach for Not Yet Techies

"Computer Careers: Working With This Open Source Microkernel, Core Code of Operating Systems"

by Richard Stooker, President Info Ring Press and author of Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career

Mach was the product of an operating systems research project of the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science from 1985 to 1994. Mach was designed to be an operating system microkernel available for use in any operating system that wanted to use it.

Mach is no longer of interest to Carnegie Mellon U, so it's been taken over the Free Software Foundation, which was involved from the beginning, and so it is open source. It has been ported to many different operating systems.

Most Unix kernels are monolithic, meaning they are built all of piece, together.

A microkernel such as Mach is made to demand only a very small set of functions -- usually a few synchronization primitives, a scheduler and interprocess communication method

Microkernels tend to be more portable than monolithic kernels, since the whole thing doesn't have to be re-written for each piece of hardware, and they make better use of RAM. However, they tend to be slower than monolithic kernels.

Mach goals include:

Providing interprocess communication functionality at the kernel level and using it as a building block for the rest of the system
Virtual memory support provided by the kernel and by user level servers
Kernel level support for light-weight threads
Support for closely and loosely coupled multi-processors and a variety of different commercially available workstations
Micro-kernel architecture limiting the functions supported by the micro-kernel and enabling multiple user level servers to support various Application and Programming Interfaces
Maintaining at least one Unix-style API to enable the Mach system to support all the everyday uses of the project members and other researchers

Mach can also be used with The Hurd kernel for Unix systems.

GNU 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. It is well suited for SMP and network cluster techniques. It provides thread support.

MiG is the Mach 3.0 interface generator, as maintained by the GNU Hurd developers for the GNU project.

Next: IBM OS/2

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