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This manual is designed to be useful to everybody who is interested in using, administering, or programming the Mach microkernel.
If you are an end-user and you are looking for help on running the Mach kernel, the first few chapters of this manual describe the essential parts of installing and using the kernel in the GNU operating system.
The rest of this manual is a technical discussion of the Mach programming interface and its implementation, and would not be helpful until you want to learn how to extend the system or modify the kernel.
This manual is organized according to the subsystems of Mach, and each chapter begins with descriptions of conceptual ideas that are related to that subsystem. If you are a programmer and want to learn more about, say, the Mach IPC subsystem, you can skip to the IPC chapter (see Inter Process Communication), and read about the related concepts and interface definitions.