Mach Speed
Mach Speed — In a letter to developers last week, Apple’s Chief Technology Officer Ellen Hancock announced that Apple has decided to use the Mach kernel as the foundation for Rhapsody, although no other details were given, including which version of Mach Apple plans to use. OpenStep is targeted at the Mach 3 kernel, whereas NeXTstep uses a variant of Mach 2.5. Presumably, Apple chose Mach in order to bring Rhapsody to market more quickly.
The Mach kernel was originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University, and is currently used by many environments, including IBM’s AIX, Apple’s MkLinux project, and Tenon Systems’ MachTen Unix environment for the Mac. Though most operating systems using Mach have been based on Unix, that doesn’t necessarily mean Rhapsody will have Unix at its heart. [GD]