[geeks] Hmmm.. food for thought...

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Tuesday, February 19, 2002 at 03:05:45 (-0500), Dave McGuire wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] Hmmm.. food for thought...
>
> On February 19, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> > >   Would the FreeBSD kernel be considered an "odd", or an "end"?
> > 
> > Actually it would be pretty odd to find the FreeBSD kernel in there....
> > 
> > Yes, there are parts of the FreeBSD kernel (filesystem, etc.), and if
> > I'm not mistaken some parts of the NetBSD kernel too (networking?), but
> > the core of the kernel is Mach, through and through....
> 
>   I was told, very specifically, that the Mach stuff was dropped.  I
> will verify this the next time I speak with Geoff.

That's simply not possible -- Mach is the core of their whole system.
Their dynamic libraries, object format, etc. are all directly based on
the Mach loader.  Their scheduler is the Mach sheduler.  Their symmetric
multiprocessing support comes from Mach.  The Mach VM is their memory
handler.  Read any of the papers on developer.apple.com to confirm.
Download the Darwin source code and see for yourself what's what.

	Beneath the appealing, easy-to-use interface of Mac OS X, you'll
	find an Mac OS X industrial-strength, UNIX-based Terminal
	foundation called Darwin.  This open Application source core of
	Mac OS X is highly stable and built on mature technology:

	* A Mach 3.0 kernel with support for symmetric multiprocessing.

	* Based on 4.4BSD with networking from FreeBSD 3.2.                                             
	  [[ this is the part that I've been told doesn't hold up
	  completely to analysis of the RCS IDs in the sources, but I
	  may be wrong as I haven't looked myself ]]

	* Support for most POSIX APIs.                     

	* Popular UNIX development tools such as GCC, GDB, vi, emacs,
	  pico, Perl, etc.

	* Popular UNIX shell tools such as grep, chmod, ps, crontab,
	  top, tail, etc.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
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