http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/10/16/freebsd_adds_support_for_snow_ leopards_grand_central_dispatch.html
Apple's Grand Central Dispatch technology, which debuted in Snow Leopard as a mechanism for optimizing parallelism across multiple cores and processors, has now been ported to FreeBSD. Apple publicly announced plans <http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/09/12/apple-open-sources-snow-leopards-g rand-central-dispatch/> to release its GCD technology as open source last month; the FreeBSD team demonstrated its early port of the new feature at EuroBSDCon 2009 in Cambridge, UK just days after Apple's announcement. Out of the box support for GCD is scheduled to appear with the release of FreeBSD 8.1. The work required to port Apple's GCD event and concurrency framework to other operating systems is more complex than many other higher-level open source packages because GCD requires integration into the kernel (the core component of the operating system which manages processes, memory, and other hardware). Most Unix-based software is highly portable between Mac OS X, Linux, and BSD, but significant kernel differences between these systems makes porting low-level, kernel-integrated technologies like GCD more work. In particular, Mac OS X uses a unique kernel design based on a hybrid of Mach and BSD. Porting GCD to FreeBSD required adaptations to account for a more conventional kernel environment without a Mach layer, such as using POSIX semaphores instead of Mach semaphores. ----------------------------------------------------------- John Scott Director, Open Source Software & Open Integration Mercury Federal Systems (Wash DC) Work 703-413-0781 ex: 5006 cell 240.401.6574 www.mercfed.com < [email protected] > http://powdermonkey.blogs.com < [email protected] > This message is intended only for the designated recipient(s) and may contain confidential or proprietary information of Mercury Federal Systems, Inc. It is solely intended to facilitate business discussions and does not constitute an express or implied offer to sell or purchase any products, services, or support. Any commitments must be made in writing and signed by duly authorized representatives of each party. _______________________________________________ opencpi_dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.opencpi.org/listinfo.cgi/opencpi_dev-opencpi.org
