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FreeBSD and xMach

I read an interview with some of the members of the FreeBSD team after seeing it posted on Slashdot. In high school I never really had a chance to toy with it as most of the geeks were Linux/BeOS/Solaris aficionados (at the time, Sun was just beginning to ‘give’ out copies of it’s x86 build).

FreeBSD is a pretty snazzy under-reported operating system that can be found primarily in servers and workstations (although there are a few desktop users out there). FreeBSD is a System IV Unix clone derived from the 386BSD distribution. It was created at University of California at Berkeley (BSD stands for Berkeley Software Distribution) to provide a freely customizable alternative to AT&T's Unix environment. It's networking stack is used as the basis for Windows NT and was most notably used in the Hotmail servers prior to Microsoft acquiring the popular webmail company.

Here is a quick historical overview of FreeBSD along with a detailed historical diagram of various Unix derivatives (I’m younger than some of them).

What caught my eye was xMach, which was originally a variation of Unix from Carnegie Mellon University (version 3.0 ended up in Mac OS X as a kernel along with FreeBSD 4.4).

I then started poking around to find more about this new project and came across another interview at OSNews (they did that FreeBSD one mentioned above) involving Mr. Joseph Mallett, Alpha Geek in the xMach project. However, that was done over 2 years ago so I set off to find out the latest. Googling his name pulled up several posts by him at FreeOS.com, the last of which was dated - Mon 30th Apr 2001 12:00:53[AM] UTC.

Then I visited his Amazon.com profile, of which his last book review was on January 16, 2002 (on MacOS X and OpenStep no less).

The Freshmeat entry for xMach states: “Invalid project ID.” SourceForge uses big red lettering to state: “This project has not yet submitted a description.” Now remember, this was started more than 2 years ago (3 really). Even the xmach.org domain was not renewed (ran out on April 5, 2003).

Pulling up a Whois query on xmach.org resulted in showing one Marc Fruchter whose name, when combined with “xmach” failed to produce any Google results. Similarly, his email address: smegnozzy@hotmail.com ‘did not match any documents.’

The only weird wrinkle I came across was this link at Advogato (they're a community for 'open-source' developers) which gives a short description of xMach and team members. Clicking on the jmallet profile brings you to a Juli Mallett who apparently is not just any geek, but a geek engaged to a geek (most probably Joseph). I didn’t find any recent information regarding xMach on her Livejournal or her journal at Advogato.

I think at this point it is safe to say that xMach is currently not being developed at the level it was initially hoped to be at (hehe, an understatement). Additionally I think it is a good time to don your shiny aluminum-foil hats and chalk up another one for the Black Helicopter Brigade. Note: check out Gentoo sometime if you're interested in a BSD-like Linux distribution.

Posted by Tim at April 28, 2003 05:18 PM | TrackBack