ken@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Ken Birman) (01/11/90)
1) Are there any plans to eliminate the AT&T code from MACH, and thus escape the AT&T licensing requirements? In what time frame? (Will AT&T sue?) 2) Could someone summarize the availability of Common LISP systems under MACH? At Cornell, people have been using Lucid and Allegro common lisp, with recent interest in Harlequin because it apparently comes closer to the symbolics environment. Whats the picture under MACH? Without a widely acceptable LISP, Cornell will resist switching to MACH, needless to say... Ken Birman
Rick.Rashid@CS.CMU.EDU (01/12/90)
CMU does plan to make the Mach kernel (without Unix compatibility support) available without external licenses. This kernel has been running at CMU for over a year and is now up on Vax, Sun 3 and PMAX platforms. CMU has two projects ongoing to provide binary Unix compatibility for the pure Mach kernel. The first to be completed is based on a single Mach task with many internal cthreads and a complementary transparent shared library. It is fully compatible with the 4.3bsd binaries which ran on earlier versions of Mach and runs on Vax, Sun 3 and PMAX platforms on the pure Mach kernel. A second effort to build a restructured OS environment which would also support BSD Unix is also underway. That system splits all key OS functions into separate servers whose functions are largely generic (i.e. independent of Unix functionality) and would be usable for a variety of OS environments. Current plans have us distributing the pure kernel with the single server Unix environment to outside research groups in late spring. Access to the Unix server would still require Berkeley licensing but access to the kernel itself, Mach libraries, etc. would not. -Rick
af@spice.cs.cmu.edu (Alessandro Forin) (01/13/90)
In article <35878@cornell.UUCP>, ken@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Ken Birman) writes: > > 2) Could someone summarize the availability of Common LISP systems under > MACH? At Cornell, people have been using Lucid and Allegro common > lisp, with recent interest in Harlequin because it apparently comes > closer to the symbolics environment. Whats the picture under MACH? > Without a widely acceptable LISP, Cornell will resist switching to > MACH, needless to say... > So would CMU, my dear :-)) All Lisps that I know of that run on U*x-BSD run on Mach unmodified. [Of course, since we are binary comaptible] This is especially true for Lucid and Franz on the boxes where they run, here we use them mostly on Suns, Vaxen and Pmaxen. I believe Franz has a Lisp for the NeXT box, but I haven't used it. CMU Common Lisp runs exclusively on IBM-RTs (for now) and provides an environment even nicer than a symbolics (opinions..), for instance you can run compile servers in parallel on remote machines (yes, from within the Hemlock editor). KCL runs, of course, I made it run on the Pmax when Allegro was not available. There are also a wealth of Schemes, included Dave Kranz' T for the Pmax. And Multilisp (I ported it to lots of Mach boxes) and Mul-T (Encore-Mach, Dave Kranz with some help from myself). And we have a variety of internal ``smaller'' lisps, like the very cute Oaklisp one. I don't know about Harlequin (when we tested it was a little rough, and people preferred Franz), but you can bet it would run just fine. Gee, I hope it's enough. sandro- PS: Apologies in advance for any accidental omission, feel free to post about it.