Mach is an
operating system microkernel developed at
Carnegie Mellon University to support operating system research, primarily distributed and parallel computation. It is one of the earliest examples of a microkernel, and still the standard by which similar projects are measured.The project at Carnegie Mellon ran from 1985 to 1994, ending with Mach 3.0. A number of other efforts have continued Mach research, including the
University of Utah's
Mach 4. Mach was developed as a replacement for the kernel in the
BSD version of
Unix, so no new operating system would have to be designed around it. Today further experimental research on Mach appears ended, although Mach and its derivatives are in use in a number of commercial operating systems, such as
NEXTSTEP and
OPENSTEP, and most notably
Mac OS X (using the
XNU kernel). The Mach VM system was also adopted by the BSD developers at
CSRG, and appears in modern BSD-derived UNIX systems, such as
FreeBSD. Neither Mac OS X nor FreeBSD maintain the microkernel structure pioneered in Mach, although Mac OS X continues to offer microkernel
Inter-Process Communication and control primitives for use directly by applications.
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