Editing MkLinux (section)

==Reception==
''MacTech'' magazine observed this of the general state of Linux on Macintosh in 1999: "Seen as a Windows NT or commercial Unix killer in some circles, Linux also promises to give the Mac OS a boost in the right direction and might even give Mac OS X Server a run for its money among Apple shops." The installation process was seen as "either smooth as silk or very, very rough" and that it "can also be slightly more difficult to recompile the MkLinux kernel because of the extra steps to placate the Mach microkernel." MkLinux had greater hardware compatibility than LinuxPPC at the time, supporting both NuBus and PCI Macintosh systems whereas LinuxPPC only supports PCI. Compared to LinuxPPC, MkLinux was generally known as having a performance cost due to the overhead of the Mach kernel. The Linux environment was found to provide a potentially adequate desktop suite, but one that forgoes the entire Macintosh experience in favor of pure Linux.<ref name="Linux Gains"/>

===Legacy===
MkLinux is the first official attempt by Apple to support a [[free and open-source software]] project.<ref name="MkLinuxApple"/> The work done with the [[Mach (kernel)|Mach]] 3.0 kernel in MkLinux is said to have been extremely helpful in the initial porting of NeXTSTEP to the Macintosh hardware platform, which would later become macOS.<ref name="AppleKernelProgrammingGuide"/>

{{Quote|OS X is based on the Mach 3.0 microkernel, designed by [[Carnegie Mellon University]], and later adapted to the Power Macintosh by Apple and the Open Software Foundation Research Institute (now part of Silicomp). This was known as <code>osfmk</code>, and was part of MkLinux (http://www.mklinux.org). Later, this and code from OSF’s commercial development efforts were incorporated into Darwin’s kernel. Throughout this evolutionary process, the Mach APIs used in OS X diverged in many ways from the original CMU Mach 3 APIs.

You may find older versions of the Mach source code interesting, both to satisfy historical curiosity and to avoid remaking mistakes made in earlier implementations.|Apple, Inc.|Kernel Programming Guide: Mach API Reference<ref name="AppleKernelProgrammingGuide"/>}}