That's quite interesting. Do you have any resource to recommend for OpenVMS or Mach architecture overview, or in general OS architecture tradeoffs and designs?
I looked into Mach circa 1991, when I had a NeXT. The NeXT OS was based on Mach 2.0 as I recall, perhaps current Darwin docs will help there. I don't have any preferred modern references. Googling for "Mach operating system" pulls up quite a few.