PPC ver of freeBSD ? isent that the main body of os X

Charles Swiger cswiger at mac.com
Wed Feb 4 09:45:26 PST 2004


On Feb 4, 2004, at 10:31 AM, Lucas Holt wrote:
> The userland is freebsd.. i.e. the executables in /usr/bin, /bin, etc. 
>  I'm sure apple alters a few things.  The part of OSX that differs is 
> in the kernel.  Roughly half the kernel is FreeBSD 5.0 and the other 
> half is based on the Mach 3.0 kernel design.

The MacOS X userland originally and primarily derives from NEXTSTEP.  
The original PPC port of NEXTSTEP, called Rhapsody, included a bunch of 
changes from NetBSD and FreeBSD (in that order), and OS X has since 
followed changes made to FreeBSD more closely.

MacOS X is using a monolithic kernel which derives from between the CMU 
Mach project v2.0 and v2.5 circa 1990, which was Avie Tenavian's grad 
project at CMU.  Apple is not using the Mach 3.0 microkernel, nor is it 
using "half of the FreeBSD 5 kernel".

-- 
-Chuck



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