Re: Power Mac Port and Mach 3.0 kernel

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

>>>>> "Craig" == Craig Oda <craig@example.com> writes:

    Craig> I'm pretty impressed that the Power Mac port of Linux is
    Craig> using the Mach 3.0 kernel.

Oh, then they're using the "Linux single server"?  I'm not clear on
what sense this is "Linux", then.  But I didn't realize the LSS was
industrial strength yet---that's cool.  Maybe I'll try to one-up JWT
and do that, too!  (I sure can't keep up with his kernel-hopping....)

One thing is you get industrial quality threads for free....  (At
least if I understand the theory of Mach correctly.)

    Craig> I've really found the Macs lacking in many areas and avoid
[snip]
    Craig> For all the flack I give the Mac, I have to admit that the
    Craig> way the toolbox forces programmers to conform to certain
    Craig> menu conventions gives the Mac a more unified feel across
    Craig> applications.

It's not like these two things are unrelated.  If you want everything
to look the same and achieve hardware plug and play (I saw my first
self-designed system based on MS/Intel Plug-n-Play yesterday (all
components were alleged to be PnP); almost needless to say, it didn't
work that way, the poor guy even had to set hardware jumpers(!); the
sound blaster still doesn't work quite right, and since it's PnP, the
docs assume things are going to work correctly), force everything to
go through a toolkit and make that toolkit proprietary.  That's why
the Mac is the computer for people who don't *ever* want to know the
revision number of their kernel, or even whether they're editing using
MS Word or Ichitaro.

Unfortunately, getting background processing right, let alone real
multitasking, makes this very very hard, as everybody I know who runs
a Mac network has found out.

Anyway, PowerMac Linux won't look like a Mac.  It'll look like <gasp>
Linux.  "All" you get is access to a different hardware architecture
and lilo will ask you if you want MacOs, along with Linux 1.4.7 or
1.5.42, instead of Win, Lose, or Draw95.  (Sorry guys, you need
Intertemporal FTP to get those kernels at the moment.)

Steve