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Date:      Fri, 17 Oct 97 13:42:48 -0400
From:      Garance A Drosehn <gad@mlor.its.rpi.edu>
To:        FreeBSD Hackers List <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Rhapsody is 4.4BSD based!?
Message-ID:  <9710171742.AA01871@mlor.its.rpi.edu>
References:  <Pine.SUN.3.90.971016231053.22323D-100000@stretch.cs.Virginia.edu> <8767qxc8ea.fsf@phaedrus.uchicago.edu>

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stephen farrell <stephen@farrell.org> writes:
> 
> "Adrian T. Filipi-Martin" <atf3r@cs.virginia.edu> writes:
> 
> > Has anyone else seen this?  Aparently Apples next generation OS 
> > is 4.4BSD based.  Do I smell a new emmulation to support?
> > 
> > You can get the basics from the following PCmag URL:
> > 	http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/news/trends/t971016a.htm
> > 
> > I wonder which 4.4BSD they started with?  It is reported to be 
> > multithreaded.  I wonder if them mean kernel-multithreaded?
> 
> I'm not sure about the 4.4BSDedness.  I think they really *mean*
> to say 4.3BSD updated with tools from 4.4BSD.  The kernel is
> still mach 2.5 (like NeXTSTEP) with BSD emulation layer, and
> as such it is a very different beast than Free|Net|OpenBSD.

I'm pretty sure it's more than an update of the tools level
executables.  They're also talking about much-improved (over
NeXTSTEP) POSIX support, although they're not promising that it
will be completely POSIX.  Seems to me that there's some file-
system changes too, but I might be wrong on that.

I don't know if the mach-based kernel they are using will be (or
already is) kernel-multithreaded.  It is supposed to support multiple
processors, although that support has never been turned on for a
shipping version of the NeXTSTEP product (and probably will not be
on for the January release of Rhapsody, either).

The rhapsody release for January will probably remain Mach 2.5-based,
but the "unified" release (later in the year) should see an upgrade
to the Mach kernel too.

I'm not sure how much this effects FreeBSD, other than it will be
interesting to again have a high-volume (*) unix which is BSD-based.
(* - at least Apple hopes it will be relatively high-volume :-).

---
Garance Alistair Drosehn     =     gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer        (MIME & NeXTmail capable)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute;           Troy NY    USA



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