8.1.2. Goals of Mach

Mach has evolved considerably since its first incarnation as RIG. The goals of the project have also changed as time has gone on. The current primary goals can be summarized as follows:

1. Providing a base for building other operating systems (e.g., UNIX).

2. Supporting large sparse address spaces.

3. Allowing transparent access to network resources.

4. Exploiting parallelism in both the system and the applications.

5. Making Mach portable to a larger collection of machines.

These goals encompass both research and development. The idea is to explore multiprocessor and distributed systems while being able to emulate existing systems, such as UNIX, MS-DOS, and the Macintosh operating system.

Much of the initial work on Mach concentrated on single– and multiprocessor systems. At the time Mach was designed, few systems had support for multiprocessors. Even now, few multiprocessor systems other than Mach are machine independent.