On Apr 6, 2006, at 12:27 PM, Adam Maas wrote:
I'll just note that Darwin is essentially dead at this point. Apple
essentially killed it a while back, around the time they announced
the move to Intel (Darwin was always more active on x86 than it was
on PPC).
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Darwin continues to be a viable
entity, and the Open Source releases continue to be updated in the
web repository with all the latest additions.
BSD is both a kernel and some userspace tools (with some GNU tools,
mostly the gcc toolchain also necessary), it's much more integrated
than say Linux, which is an amalgam of a bunch of not necessarily
related projects (Almost none of which are from the BSD project).
FreeBSD is one of several descendents of 386BSD, the original free
BSD. When the 386BSD project foundered, two splinter project became
OS's in ther own right, FreeBSD and NetBSD, all current BSD OS's
are descended from one of the two(OS X uses code from both,
although it's heavily weighted toward FreeBSD).
Mach isn't a kernel, it's a micro-kernel, and only handles the
lowest level interaction with hardware, Part of the FreeBSD kernel
lives on top of it, as well as some other stuff which would be
considered part of the kernel on other systems (IOKit, some parts
of Quartz). You are correct in that the BSD userspace is mostly
seperate from the GUI userspace on OS X, although there is some
interaction, primarily for network services (OS X's firewall is a
straight ipfw implementation for example)
Ok, I'll grant you that BSD, and all of its derivatives and
analogues, is even broader than my characterization... it's a messy
world down there in the OS ... The Mach kernel's function is memory
management and process management. Most everything else rests on
those functions, and only a small portion of that could be considered
as derivative of BSD other than the FreeBSD components and things
that use them.
My point was that graywolf's assertion that Mac OS X amounts to
nothing more than Apple's adoption of BSD is incorrect/incomplete,
overly simplistic.
Godfrey
