UNIX VS LINUX VS WINDOWS VS MAC KEYGEN
This is what the NeXTSTEP operating systems were using.
NeXT went with the Mach 2.5 kernel (which was based on either BSD 4.2 or 4.3) and GNU would not actually start on the work for years. The benchmarks of this VM-backed faster Unix system is what drove people at NeXT and at the FSF to pick Mach as the foundation for their kernels.
This idea was essentially a variation of trying to avoid making copies of the same data, but it was pitched as a benefit of micro kernels, even if the feature could be isolated from a micro kernel. The idea was to use the mmap system call to pass data to be copied from user space to the "servers" implementing the file system. I am not 100% sure if mmap came from Mach, and later was adopted by BSD, or if Mach merely pioneered the idea and BSD added their own mmap based on the ideas of Mach.Īlthough the Mach kernel was described as a micro-kernel, up to version 2.5 it was merely a system that provided the thread, mmap, message passing features but remained a monolithic kernel, all the services were running on kernel mode.Īt this time Rick Rashid (now at Microsoft) and Avie Tevanian (now at Apple) had come up with a novel idea that could accelerate Unix. At CMU, the BSD kernel was used as the foundation for prototyping a few new ideas: threads, an API to control the virtual memory system (through pluggable "pagers" - user level mmap), a kernel-level remote procedure call system and most importantly the idea of moving some kernel level operations to user space. Meanwhile, research continued and some folks adopted the work from BSD as a foundation. AT&T went on their own way and built System V at the same time. This Unix was improved extensively at Berkeley and became the foundation for the BSD variations of Unix and incorporated several new innovations like the "Fast File System" (UFS), introduced symlinks and the sockets API. It all starts with AT&T distributing their operating system to some universities for free. The origin of the kernel is a bit more complicated. I was very interested in this in the late 90's as Mach had been pitched around the world as a faster way of building a Unix system. The history of MacOS is a little bit more convoluted.