jevans@uunet.UU.NET (David Jevans) (05/16/89)
We are going to Mach on our Butterfly sometime in
the next few weeks. My first duty will be to
port our TimeWarp simulation system from
Chrysalis to the new OS. Has anyone used both
Mach and Chrysalis or ported from one to the
other?
The reason for the inquiry is that I have heard
ugly rumours about the bugginess of Mach. I
have heard of projects being abandonded, and
of people reverting to Chrysalis due to problems
with Mach.
If the consensus is that Mach is a real horror-show,
we'll likely delay the port until next year, and
simply alternate between Mach and Chrysalis
(boot Chrysalis on monday, wednesday, and friday :-)
Any email responses are most welcome.
David Jevans, U of Calgary Computer Science, Calgary AB T2N 1N4 Canada
uucp: ...{ubc-cs,utai,alberta}!calgary!jevansRick.Rashid@cs.cmu.edu (05/16/89)
I unfortunately cannot comment on the Butterfly version of Mach since we do not have access to a Butterfly here in the Mach group at CMU. I can comment about Mach on a variety of architectures (both uniprocessor and MP) which we do use here at CMU: Mach currently runs in production on over 500 machines at CMU including Vax, Sun-3, IBM RT, NeXT and Encore Multimax (16-CPU) systems. Vax multiprocessors we use include 6200 (8-CPU), 8200 (4-CPU) and 8800 (2-CPU) systems. All of these systems are available to general users, maintained by our Facilities staff and stable. In addition, Mach is running at CMU on 386 AT-bus systems, Macintosh II, DecStation 3100 (aka PMAX), MIPS and Sun-4 machines. Outside of CMU Mach has been ported to the IBM 370 family, the Intel i860 (aka N10) and a host of other systems. Mt Xinu, in Berkeley, has announced that it will begin to distribute Mach commercially on a number of platforms. CMU currently distributes Mach for VAX, SUN-3 and IBM RT architectures. Information and licensing forms can be obtained by sending mail to mach@cs.cmu.edu or by phoning the Mach project at (412)268-7665. CMU does not charge a licensing fee, royalty, or distribution free for Mach tapes. If you are interested in other versions or commercial support you should contact the companies involved (e.g. Encore, NeXT, Mt Xinu, BBN, etc.). If you use machine types for which Mach is not offered by the manufacturer, just lobby your local sales force :-).