Dell GNU/Linux survey

[Darrin Chandler]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 09:34:24AM -0700, Micah DesJardins wrote:
> Lynn Newton wrote:
> >> Isn't the Mac OS just a fancy gui sitting on top of BSD?
> Darrin Chandler wrote:
> >Apple used *significant* parts of FreeBSD for OS X. They made
> >modifications, and added tons of stuff to make it Mac-like. So the short
> >answer is "yes."
> 
> I would argue a more correct answer would be "sort of"
> 
> The Mac OS X kernel (known as XNU) has several distinct parts. In it
> is a variant of the FreeBSD monolithic kernel, the Mach microkernel
> and a driver interface known as I/O Kit.  Significant amounts of code
> is an understatement.  BSD is nearly everywhere underneath Mac OS X,
> but to paraphrase Spock, "It's not BSD as we know it Captain."
> 
> A lot of modification has been done to make these disparate pieces
> hang together, but underneath it's still -at the very least- BSD-style
> code and much of it is indeed "the same" as the FreeBSD 5 code base it
> branched from.  From a userland perspective, if you treat it like BSD,
> you're generally alright minus a few gotchas.  From a programming
> perspective it's a very different beast.  So I suppose in the end, how
> it looks is dependent on where you are standing and what portion of
> the beast you are looking at.
> 
> If anyone is interested in the full story, I recommend the book _Mac
> OS X Internals - A Systems Approach_ by Amit Singh.

Thank you for the much better answer!

-- 
Darrin Chandler                   |  Phoenix BSD Users Group
dwchandler at stilyagin.com          |  http://bsd.phoenix.az.us/
http://www.stilyagin.com/darrin/  |