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Here's the timeline, taken straight from http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/history.html.

  "At the time of this writing, Mac OS X has seen four major releases: 10.0 ("Cheetah", March 24, 2001), 10.1 ("Puma", September 29, 2001), 10.2 ("Jaguar", August 13, 2002), and 10.3 ("Panther", October 24, 2003)." They left out this part though (old page I guess). "On April 29, 2005, Apple released Mac OS X v10.4 "Tiger" to the general public."

  So the short answer to your question is 2001. I guess generally they're yearly releases after all, Slashdot's 'here's what's coming for OSX 10.x' stories tend to skew my memory. :)

Look at the history of OS X. You'll find that it hails from interesting roots - NeXTStep. :)

Look at this.

I'm a recent convert to OS X from Linux (running WindowMaker). Try it before you knock it.

Ehh, please don't use lame windoze rubbish like Melissa and ILoveYou as examples of some bygone golden age. Mention something with a bit of substance, like the Morris worm, Zalewski's WormNet, Creeper or even Shockwave Rider.

If you want to get *really* technical, we're both wrong. The BSD kernel in Mach 2.5 (and in XNU) is neither above nor below the Mach portion. Rather, it's one kernel with some services handled by Mach and some by BSD. In the original design (according to the sources I've read) pretty much the entire BSD 4.2 kernel was linked in with the Mach IPC structuring. The result was that it was an even bigger monolithic kernel than before, but with support for micro-kernel extensions. Mach also added a more powerful scheduling system utilizing threads as well as processes.

20 years later, you can see practically the exact same structure in XNU.

The reason why I say that Mach is a super-kernel is that it was theoretically portable to other kernel structures. The end goal was to kick the regular kernel services upstairs, but until 3.0, it just sort of attached directly to whatever kernel it was linked with.

What isn't clear to me is, did NeXT or Apple ever upgrade to the 3.0 Mach kernel then overhaul it, or did they stick with the higher performance 2.5 series and hedge their monolithic bets? :-)

Just wanted to chime in with these two links, describing the architecture:

  - Architecture of MacOS X
  - XNU: The Kernel

and then some more from Apple on Darwin:

  - Darwin Documentation

Just wanted to chime in with these two links, describing the architecture:

  - Architecture of MacOS X
  - XNU: The Kernel

and then some more from Apple on Darwin:

  - Darwin Documentation

OS X has never been based on FreeBSD's kernel. ... OS X's kernel has always been based on OPENSTEP's--a Mach microkernel with custom Unix services above it.

And where do you think those UNIX services come from?

Because the answer is, FreeBSD.

Mach isn't a kernel by itself, it provides very low level services and "hosts" the rest of the kernel (though Darwin blurs this line somewhat, such that the mach microkernel and hosted freebsd kernel are technically the same entity). FreeBSD isn't the entire kernel (and its portion of the kernel isn't the part that provides threading services, see link above) but it is still in the kernel and still provides crucial functionality, and serves as a replacement for certain things which in the pre-OS X kernel used to be provided by OpenStep code.

I was looking at Mac OSX Server 1.0, which came out in March of 1999, the same month as Gnome 1.0.

Mac OSX link

The Mach kernel was initially hosted on BSD, and certainly looked to it for specifications and userland and so forth, but the actual kernel was new code as I understand it. Certainly it's hard to imagine how or why one would rewrite a monolithic kernel to produce a microkernel. This account would seem to make much more sense.

Microsoft released MS-DOS 4.0 in June, 1988. 4.0 had several improvements, such as XMS support, larger hard disk partition support (up to 2 GB) and a mouse-driven graphical interface called the DOS SHELL. MS-DOS 4.0 had an abnormally large number of bugs, many of which were fixed in version 4.01 that was released a few months later.

actually, the latest Powerbooks have this capability. There are already a few apps that use this "input device" for things like moving a ball or triggering an alarm. I'm not sure that it would be much good as a pointing device, but it might be fun to try.

The iPOd is based on a proprietary OS licensed by Apple:

The iPod uses PortalPlayer's "Digital Media Platform", which is marketed as a turn-key solution as it includes System-On-Chip integrated circuits (ICs), a customizable firmware suite, integrated third party services, PC software, and so on. The iPod uses PortalPlayer's PP50xx chip, which contains two ARM7TDMI microprocessor cores. The iPod's embedded operating system, including its encoding and decoding components, also come from PortalPlayer. iPod's OS

Have you heard Steve Jobs whining about the The PortalPlayer Tax? I didn't think so.

This page does a fairly good job of describing the limitations of the current legacy PC BIOS, and the ways EFI aims to improve the situation

http://www.kernelthread.com/publications/firmware/

No, speed does NOT necessitate that drivers run in the kernel. A GOOD microkernel architecture like QNX Neutrino is a perfect example. QNX powers Cisco's CRS-1 Carrier Routing System - a router which Guinness World Records has certified as the highest capacity internet router ever developed. It can handle up to 92 terabits/sec total throughput.

Also, the Mac OS X kernel, XNU, contains code which is based on Mach, but it isn't Mach - I.E. it's not a true microkernel.

Macs already do this, to some extent. Check here and look under BootCache.

I remember one Panther pack (10.3.2 perhaps) that broke this on some machines, and boot times went to nearly a minute and a half on my powerbook.

I think it's a great compromise between hibernation and normal booting.

Apple did do a lot to improve the boot time: there's a boot cache, a kernel extension cache, hot file clustering, prebinding, on-the-fly defragmentation and more. Even old macs (e.g. 300 Mhz G3's) boot up OS X fairly quick.

This has been fun. I have frequented the forums for a while now and have never really posted anything other than brief comments here and there but this one I thought I would go at it full board. Thanks for replies and you are all right. My response has been short and to the point with many technicalities left out because it was a spur of the moment post. That's what makes this fun and able to enjoy everyone elses take on matters.
As far as OS X being FreeBSD is absurd and I should have stated that more correctly in that it is derived from FreeBSD. It is as close to FreeBSD as Linux is to UNIX as well as OS X is UNIX.
Stating that open source is just plain more secure is an obvious over-simplification. But the fact is that open source applications, especially the Linux kernel has a better chance of being more secure with more eyes on the code world-wide.
For somone to call Windows and Mac users my opponents is funny as well. I dont have opponents in the computer world. I support all of them. I have built fairly complex web server environments on both Linux and Windows. I have had to support Mac users in a graphics environment and have enjoyed it all. I like to express opinions as well as listen to them. And when I said "idiots" it meant that an entirely graphical Operating System to me and to most SysAdmins is a limitation more than a benefit. If you are a user of the operating system it is better through and through. In other words, at times, GUI OSes are "idiot proof" not that only idiots use them. In fact, I want to buy a Mac for my own personal use but I cant afford one for one.
In the end, my statements were just as short and rash as the original statement.
I am sure you have already read this but check this out as well http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/unix/

Also, take a look at this especially under the heading "BSD": http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/arch_xnu.html

Thanks.

OSX was build from almost scrath in less than half the time Linux has been in existence.

Woah there nelly. You haven't got that one quite right. The origins of OS X began in 1985 with the first public release in 1988. It's older than Linux by a few years. It evolved a bit between 1988 and 1997 before Apple bought it, and Apple did some fairly major reworking, but OS X has a 20 year history and has spent 8 years with Apple. Linux is only 14 years old and KDE/GNOME are only 8 years old. So to be completely honest, the KDE/GNOME guys have managed to build *two* desktops from scratch in less than half the time OS X has been in existence! You got it exactly backwards.

and some nice pre-binding too

....XNU is. It is partly based on Mach, however it is also NOT a microkernel, as many of the BSD subsystems that normally live in userspace are incorporated into the XNU kernel. I'm (not) surprised that no one has pointed this out.

Amit Singh of Kernelthread.com has an excellent handful of articles on OS X kernel and filesystem details.

Actually, the grandparent IS correct. I spent the last week studying the Mach and OS X designs, and I found the following things:

1. Mach is not a complete kernel. It requires someone to implement the areas which the Mach group were not researching. This has traditionally been done by compiling against BSD 4.3.

2. Mac OS X updated to the FreeBSD kernel instead of BSD 4.3 to gain a more modern kernel design with better hardware support.

3. OS 9 "Classic" is not a microkernel server, but rather a technology that Apple calls "Blue Box". Blue Box is a hardware virtualizer like VMWare that is capable of communicating directly with the OS X desktop. Using this communication, the OS 9 desktop is made to disappear, making the application appear to run on the OS X desktop.

4. The combination of Mach and FreeBSD is called "XNU" by Apple. The complete os is called Darwin, and the commercial variety with the Next and Mac APIs is called "Mac OS X".

More Info:
Mach Kernel
Wikipedia: Mach
Wikipedia: XNU
Blue Box info

This seems cool, and it reminds me of when Amid Singh ran some ancient Unices on his GBA emulator. Pretty impressive, it can only get better. Makes me a little more interested in shelling out the $149 for a Ninetendo DS; I can see a lot of usefulness in having an ultra-portable *nix system around me at all times. I wonder if there are any small keyboards for the Nintendo DS?

Now if only NetBSD does a port....

My brain nearly imploded when reading this review. I realized after so many years of being treated to 1-3 page reviews that skimmed over everything except the authors ego, I had almost forgotten what an in-depth review could be (I'm ignoring Amit Singh's http://www.kernelthread.com/ since they're more like white papers).

It was great to read about a lot of backend stuff like metadata handling or core video rather than just here about Spotlight again and again. No mistake, I'm looking forward to spotlight, but I like knowing how things work and or the problems that had to be overcome to get them to work.

When a file is opened on an HFS+ volume, the following conditions are tested:

• If the file is less than 20 MB in size
• If the file is not already busy
• If the file is not read-only
• If the file has more than eight extents
• If the system has been up for at least three minutes

If all of the above conditions are satisfied, the file is relocated -- it is defragmented on-the-fly.

Philips developed the I2C bus in the early 1980s. I2C is a multi-master control bus using which various ICs in a system can communicate with each other. It uses only two control lines, and has a software-defined protocol. I2C compatible devices typically have on-chip communication interfaces for direct communication with each other over the bus.

OS X is to BSH what KDE is to LINUX.

People in Capital One, Compound Therapeutics, Fossil, Goldman Sachs, IKEA, and SAAB were interested enough to download this, but no one from the Semantecs/Sophos/Secunas of this world found it worth their while to check it out??!!

I would certainly hope that they are paying attention to the use of dynamic code modification, code obfuscation, and red herrings. While these techniques are not new, none of the (Windows) malware seen so far were designed to be even half as proficient in these matters as panpipes. Further, Amit has stated that he could have made panpipes even more difficult to debug (but didn't).

Kudos to Amit for this highly educational exercise! He certainly seems to know his way about the innards of OS X (not to mention all the other OSes he runs on his 17"PB via VPC.)

(I bet he has some interesting insights about the evolution and workings of OSes from MS (he is running ALL the flavors of DOS and Windows that I know of.)

People in Capital One, Compound Therapeutics, Fossil, Goldman Sachs, IKEA, and SAAB were interested enough to download this, but no one from the Semantecs/Sophos/Secunas of this world found it worth their while to check it out??!!

I would certainly hope that they are paying attention to the use of dynamic code modification, code obfuscation, and red herrings. While these techniques are not new, none of the (Windows) malware seen so far were designed to be even half as proficient in these matters as panpipes. Further, Amit has stated that he could have made panpipes even more difficult to debug (but didn't).

Kudos to Amit for this highly educational exercise! He certainly seems to know his way about the innards of OS X (not to mention all the other OSes he runs on his 17"PB via VPC.)

(I bet he has some interesting insights about the evolution and workings of OSes from MS (he is running ALL the flavors of DOS and Windows that I know of.)

People in Capital One, Compound Therapeutics, Fossil, Goldman Sachs, IKEA, and SAAB were interested enough to download this, but no one from the Semantecs/Sophos/Secunas of this world found it worth their while to check it out??!!

I would certainly hope that they are paying attention to the use of dynamic code modification, code obfuscation, and red herrings. While these techniques are not new, none of the (Windows) malware seen so far were designed to be even half as proficient in these matters as panpipes. Further, Amit has stated that he could have made panpipes even more difficult to debug (but didn't).

Kudos to Amit for this highly educational exercise! He certainly seems to know his way about the innards of OS X (not to mention all the other OSes he runs on his 17"PB via VPC.)

(I bet he has some interesting insights about the evolution and workings of OSes from MS (he is running ALL the flavors of DOS and Windows that I know of.)

"I think you must be hacking the main frame to crash the kernal. Whatever you're program is doing, its hot stuff!"

"While I haven't looked at your program, but have you checked permissions? I had my system crash at random times due to messed up permissions on my external drive."

"Could you at least of provided a simple Cocoa GUI for your program? Terminal app programs are not very popular with Mac people, you know."

"Who do you think you are for insulting people like this?"

To quote "Apple had been desperately seeking to create an operating system that could compete with the onslaught from Microsoft... "

"At this point Apple became interested in buying Be, a company that was becoming popular as the maker of the BeBox, running the BeOS. The deal between Apple's Gil Amelio and Be's Gassée never materialized - it has been often reported that Apple offered $125 million while Be wanted an "outrageous" $200 million plus."

BeOS was considered very strongly as a foundation for what would become OS X instead of NeXT - see the What is OS X? guide.

but you know what might work? use a panoramic camera to take the picture, then get your desktop to scroll as you spin in your chair with Amit Singh's AMS hack.

Now, I see lots of reasons this wouldn't work, or would be difficult to implement. The main thing would be holding the laptop exactly right as you spun in place. You'd need some sort of rig to keep the lap top positioned correctly. The other big thing is I don't know how sensitive and accurate the AMS is, so it might be impossible to sync up.

well it shows you how easy it is to develop something this non-trivial using XCode and how "difficult" it is on other platforms.

I question if anything in the article or elsewhere actually points to this hypothesis at all.

A new Xcode project can be instantiated from a large number of templates. As can be seen, it supports development of various kinds of programs in C, C++, Objective-C, Objective-C++, Java and Assembly. For example, it is almost trivial to create things such as Screen Savers, Preference Panes (the kind you see under System Preferences), etc.

Xcode has some neat and useful features: Predictive compilation runs the compiler in the background as you edit the source. Once you are ready to build, the hope is that most of the building would have been done already. "Zero Link" links at runtime instead of compile time, whereby only code needed to run the application is linked in and loaded. A related feature is "Fix and Continue", courtesy which you can make a change to your code and have the code compiled and inserted into a running program. Distributed builds are also supported via integration with distcc.

etc...

You can "rootkit" BSD boxes. Though from here its a bit more than just BSD... sort of a mix.

Poorly administered servers can get trashed. If your root password is "r00t", it won't take long for someone to figure it out.

You need to be concerened only insofar as you need to have a network admin (or something to that affect). How do you know when your network is being attacked? How do you know what attacks are being tried? If you aren't analyzing your network thats the worst mistake anyone can make.

That being said, there is this virus, its called "rm -rf *", its really bad.

Also have a look at the comic he has painted, when he was just 12 - it's amazing.

1. Kernelthread.com gives credit to Eric Meyer.
http://www.kernelthread.com/about/

2. Eric Meyer is OK with this. It's with his permission:
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2004/01/15/

to check the small movie showing how that sensor is used for
scrolling the content of the Google Maps web site in Safari. Pretty cool I must say.

...that this Amit Singh actually is a researcher at IBM Almaden Research Center.

Apologies for the munged link in my initial post.

What's even cooler about Amit Singh is that he's a he's a researcher at IBM Alamaden Research Center, working on, among other things, secure communications and Linux on the desktop.

And be sure to check out his other articles, particularly What is Mac OS X? . They're all well written, comprehensive on their respective topics, and generally excellent.

What's even cooler about Amit Singh is that he's a he's a researcher at IBM Alamaden Research Center, working on, among other things, secure communications and Linux on the desktop.

And be sure to check out his other articles, particularly What is Mac OS X? . They're all well written, comprehensive on their respective topics, and generally excellent.

The OS is more reliable then Windows, however the hardware can still fail. They use standard disks

Yes and no. They mount the disc in shock-absorbent rubber (which Toshiba/Compal didn't for my x86 laptop, relying on the rigidity of the plastic case to protect it) and there is a "sudden motion sensor" either in the laptop or the drive, which, under the control of software, can unload the heads before the laptop hits the ground. More details here. IBM do something similar on their Thinkpads.

Then twenty years later a new method of distribution comes along called Book 2.0

Actually, David Gerrold did just this with When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One (the book that introduced the term "virus" as applied to software, though that was a brief tangent to the story). The later version is indeed titled When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One, Version 2.0. I have copies of both editions, they are radically different.

IMHO, they're two different works and both should be in print.

The article just points to the home page. The Perm link to the Blog entry or http://www.kernelthread.com/blog/archives/000023.h tml

Or one that defragments files when you open them, like HFS+.

In spite of the author's quote, "Needless to say, it is quite a hellish experience trying to use the computer in this manner," it's just asking for someone to install it on some poor clod's computer, getting him drunk, and then have him try to do something productive like code in Perl.

"Hey... WTF does an upside down exclamation point stand for?"

It loads a kernel based on os9. I don't see how it can be anything else.


Now you're just making shit up. The Mac OS X kernel is called XNU and is based on Mach and BSD, and has nothing to do with OS 9.

"XNU's BSD component uses FreeBSD as the primary reference codebase (although some cod might be traced to other BSDs). Darwin 7.x (Mac OS X 10.3.x) uses FreeBSD 5.x. As mentione before, BSD runs not as an external (or user-level) server, but is part of the kernel itself. " -- XNU : The Kernel

it has a 'bsd like' micro kernel. How does that make it linux/bsd? Why do people think the entire os is based on bsd? what a joke.

You don't know anything about Mac OS X, do you?

"Darwin 7.0.x (corresponding to Mac OS X 10.3.x) consists of over 250 packages. Many of these ar Apple packages (including the Mac OS X kernel and various drivers), while the others originat from *BSD, GNU, etc. Apple has leveraged a lot of existing open source software by integrating i well (usually) with their system: apache, bind, binutils, cvs, gcc, gdb, gimp_print, kerberos, mysql openssh, openssl, pam, perl, postfix, ppp, python, rsync, samba, and many more BSD/GNU/othe packages ... are all part of Darwin." -- Architecture of Mac OS X

HURD is a rekindling of a Unix kernel. It's microkernel design basically brings us back to MACH/BSD, which .. oh.. hmm.. nextstations were what, 1989, 1990?

*yawn*


You see Apple yawning?

Yes, "the world" as in anybody who would care to implement a computer to do some work for a multitude of users. Geek development community. Check. Businesses in search of a computing platform designed for stability and flexibility. Check. Operating system researchers. Check. Linux users. Obviously, check. Those in need of superior reliability. Check.

My mother? She's not part of the world to which I'm referring. But she does know there are viable alternatives to the desktop she's found herself sometimes tortured by on a daily basis.

The modern world has been introduced to Linux. They heard about it during the bubble. People now know there are other things out there besides what comes from Redmond, SCO, IBM, or HP. If they find that isn't suitable for them, or it has failed them in the past, they can search for alternatives. What's more valuable than choice when searching for alternatives? The argument can be made that choice quality is more valuable than choice volume. I'd counter with the fact that competition between choices typically raises quality across the board.

Unix has been around for a long time and in the meantime computing users have explored many of the alternatives. OS/2 and BeOS have not lived up to the task. BSD can certainly stand on it's own. NeXTStep's legacy can be seen in the wildly popular OSX from Apple. Who's to say something better than Linux can't come along?

Admittedly, referring to a bunch of geeks and business as "the world" is a stretch. Point taken. One must look however at growing market share in Asia, India and other places across the globe to understand why I chose the term. Growth in these places is booming. The world is waking up to life outside the intentional incompatibilities and blue screens currently sitting on their desks.