Based on Mach, and POSIX compliant this distributed Operating System, supported on i386 and SUN SPARC among others, can be used to paralell process many single board computers over Ethernet.

Joseph Mallett writes "xMach today announces our brand new Core Team. We've also (finally) added a CVS server, as well as

a CVSweb front-end so people can browse the source. Since the first Slashdot post, we've accomplished one of our major

goals of being GPL-free (and thus fully BSD License'd), as well as added two mailing lists and fixed the wishlist code. Due to

Mach's history with Multiprocessing, we are currently looking more and more and the ideas of distributed processing. The code

Joseph Mallett writes "We've now removed most (all?) of the GPL code.

Also, we've integrated the RTMach Lites code, for better

application-level compat with modern operating systems.

We've got a few individuals working on porting either

FreeBSD or OpenBSD device driver frameworks to xMach

so that our native drivers (as the Linux ones are gone) will

be wider and varying than the (extremely) limited Mach

drivers that we currently have. We're also removing all

code not pertinent to Mach4 (i.e. OSFMACH and Mach3)

as part of our new 'slogan'(?): Proactively Unbloated.

"Myself, Joseph Mallett, and David Jorm have recently begun to take xMach in a slightly more specialised direction, concentrating on disk and i/o for mass storage, network fileserver, and (possibly) forensics applications. With improvements made to Disk I/O, a server setting could also be suitable. I've begun to squash some of the bugs that were left in by previous developers, because I didn't quite understand some workings of assembley constructs inside GCC. I'm taking a trip to Australia to stay with David Jorm and work out details of xMach and do some (hopefully) serious code hacking.

"We have two new uploads. A binary tarball, and a source tarball. With the source... kernel and lites compile cleanly on FreeBSD, user and kernel compile cleanly on Linux 2.4.1 (Slackware). The binary should be extracted in / and will require a little hacking with symlinks, etc., on whoever's part, but they should work. I don't have a test box, all the fixes are compile-time related... But it IS a step in the right direction. By the way, I redid the website so it's a little cleaner."

xMach is now released under the BSD license, with the understanding that certain portions of the code, which were taken from an outside source, which will be modified and incorporated into xMach at will, but all modifications to them must be made available under the terms of the original license. In other words, you can make a closed-source xMach derivative, but the GPL'd code has to be released publicly under the GPL.

"There should be a good stable source code release Real Soon Now. I'd like to invite the open source community to join the project, I know we've been a bit disorganised, but I'd love to see the readers of FreeOS.com join on and contribute. For those of you not in to kernel hacking, there's a number of sub-projects regarding security and devices and such that might be of interest to you. Also, the wishlist on the website is there now - use it!!"

Official download site is now http://www.xMach.org/src/.

Ports now for HP PA-RISC, SGI MIPS, Sun4u, and i386

(official description Not -too- shabby. Still need developers).

A online wishlist - feel free to ask for everything you could ever

want!

A newsgroup - alt.os.xmach. That's the best place to ask

questions or send bugs.

A few new 'ideas' have been announced. There's more

coming this week.