The latest addition to the groups working on a desktop Unix for Macintosh is one at Santa Clara University. The native Mach/BSD Unix implementation is a by-product of the team’s efforts to develop a distributed operating environment dubbed the Local Area MultiProcessor. Machines in a Local Area MultiProcessor network actually share physical memory across the network, with cache coherency maintained by specialised hardware in the workstations. Currently the team, lead by Dr Qiang Li, is building the system on Power Macs, since the machines’ Processor Direct Slots make it easy to implement the distributed cache coherency needed. As part of the software side of the project, the team have built a Mach/BSD-Unix operating system. Now Li believes that the work may be applicable beyond the Local Area MultiProcessor project. We tentatively call our version of Mach ‘PMacMach’, said Li in a posting on Usenet. The porting started in summer 1994 and has been carried out mainly by three graduate students. After long and painstaking effort, we have been able to boot the single-user mode and execute external commands from the Unix shell. There is still a lot of work ahead before the system will be stable, but the biggest hurdle for bootstrapping the system is almost overcome. Funding from Apple Computer Inc and the US National Science Foundation covers the core Local Area MultiProcessor activity only, and there are no resources available to turn PMacMach into a separate, stand-alone project. Also, Li says that since it involves Apple’s confidential information, it is difficult to have people outside our school get involved, except at a very high level, such as converting gcc. So where does the project go from here? It would be ideal if someone would give money to support two students jus t to finish the porting and maintain the system. But I know I am stretching, said Li. – Chris Rose
