From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Feb 25 08:39:10 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.9/8.6.6) id IAA08837 for hackers-outgoing; Sat, 25 Feb 1995 08:39:10 -0800 Received: from seagull.rtd.com (root@Seagull.rtd.com [198.102.68.2]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.9/8.6.6) with ESMTP id IAA08827 for ; Sat, 25 Feb 1995 08:39:08 -0800 Received: (from dgy@localhost) by seagull.rtd.com (8.6.9/8.6.9.1) id JAA05276; Sat, 25 Feb 1995 09:38:26 -0700 From: Don Yuniskis Message-Id: <199502251638.JAA05276@seagull.rtd.com> Subject: Re: Lites and Doom To: kelly@fsl.noaa.gov (Sean Kelly) Date: Sat, 25 Feb 1995 09:38:26 -0700 (MST) Cc: freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com (FreeBSD hackers) In-Reply-To: <9502250005.AA20919@junco.fsl.noaa.gov> from "Sean Kelly" at Feb 24, 95 05:05:45 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1437 Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > >> Is Lites officially out now??? > Don> Yes. It was released a few days ago... > > Okay ... what the poop is Lites anyway? First, I think my original statement (above) may be in error... I think rev 0.8 is available and 1.0 is due in a matter of hours. I've also heard from jvh that a 1.1 will follow at some point. Apologies to all... :-( OK, as for "what it is"... LITES is a BSD4.4 lites derived single server running atop the Mach microkernel. I believe LITES is unencumbered. Mach3 is a freely redistributable microkernel originally developed at CMU. Work is now continuing at Utah and OSF/RI. Another group at CMU continues to work on real-time extensions to Mach3. OSF/1 from OSF uses a modified earlier version (~2.5) of the Mach kernel to implement a BSD4.3 (?) single server. DEC uses OSF/1 on their Alphas (and others?). I think IBM's OS/2 port to one of the RISC machines is Mach based, also. The HURD is expected to ride atop Mach4 (from Utah). CMU has also produced BSDSS, Mach-UX (a 4.3 single server for Mach3), and Mach-US (ditto except a *multi*-server configuration). Each of these are encumbered to some extent with BSD licensing. The structure of the microkernel allows multiple OS personalities to actively coexist as independant servers riding atop the same microkernel. And, since Mach is a message passing kernel, it seems like an obvious choice for a multiprocessor OS implementation.