Merging Unix And Mac OS

martin writes: "Here's an interesting article on 32bitsonline writing up one of Apple's chief O/S engineers talk at Usenix2000 on how they produced Mac OS X. Interesting to see how the design elements of Mac OS have been merged into BSD to produce a hybrid of the the two OSs."

Comments

Question...

[LLatson]

Okay, my sister recently bought a top-o-the-line Powerbook G3, and I was really impressed (and jealous). I played with OSX for a while, and it is really cool, although it seemed a little slow. I think the new graphics system is a lot, even for a G3.

I also got to see Virtual PC. From my last experience with it (several years ago) it was a dinosaur and hardly worth using. But now it is fast as heck, and I think you can even install other OS's (Linux, BSD's, etc) under it as well.

Question: with OSX, will Virtual PC still be around? I would think that the challenges of getting a Windows system running when the entire underlying MacOS has changed would be formidible. Will OSX use something like WINE instead?

LL

Doesn't say much

[Animats]

All the problems mentioned in that article were solved in A/UX, Apple's 68K UNIX with a MacOS penalty box on top. What they don't discuss is how they dealt with the problems that weren't solved in A/UX, and which kept A/UX from being useful to MacOS users. For example, how are legacy apps which make the lower-level MacOS calls handled? What about MacOS interprocess communication, such as it is? How are system tasks, VBI tasks, timer tasks, and similar MacOS legacy mechanisms emulated? What was left out? Will MS Office for Mac work in the penalty box, or do users have to buy a new version of Office?

On the UNIX side, how are the problems of UNIX system administration handled? Are all the text configuration files gone, or did Apple just put GUI wallpaper over them?

For that matter, is it really BSD underneath? They don't mention Mach at all. Was the NeXT stuff dumped completely?

the biggest challenge

[happystink]

Of course the biggest challenge to making MacOS more unix-like was giving the little mac guy who comes up during the startup screen a beard and making him fatter :)

p.s. no offence to anyone, i'm a fat unix guy with a beard. aren't we all?

Re:the biggest challenge

[xianzombie]

i'm a fat unix guy with a beard. aren't we all?

Myself and a friend of mine were discussing that once, mainly the beard issue. We applied this more to techies in general though. Heres what we came up with:

1. New Guy Learning Unix -- undefined

2. Newbie Unix Guy on the Job -- small goatee, perhaps just a mustache, but not looking like a used car salesman*

3. Intermediate to Advanced Unix Guys -- Full Beard, perhaps slightly balding, but not a nessacity. Starting to put on some weight

4. Unix Guru/Techie God Status -- This guy could almost pass for a member of ZZ Top.

Unfortunatly, I'm at the top of the list...as soon as I start getting more well versed in the realms of Unix systems, I can start growing the goatee at least (if my wife lets me). What she dosen't understand though, is that no one (in their right mind) will entrust their networks to a Unix guy who dosen't have at least some facial hair

More answers to Mac OS meets Unix

[NetCurl]

Check out this article posted today at MacCentral. This is the second of two article covering "Road to Mac OS X: Unix and Mac OS X Part II." The first article is here and contains some more details regarding how this merger is going to take place.

There is also a LOT more information at MacSecurity.org which goes into much more detail regarding all the ill-informed posts here on permissions and questions regarding security.

The optional installs will make the box as secure, or open, as you would imagine. But like an true server, the knowledge of the admin/user is the crucial part in the safety of the system.

All in all, these two articles and one site will give you the answers to most of the questions regarding how this project is coming together.

I think we may be in for a surprise when OS X comes out. Good or bad is yet to be determined.

D�j� vu

[Kaufmann]

"We have all been here before..."

Dammit, you got me whistling a CSN song!

Anyway, this story has already been posted, as "The Challenges of Integrating Unix and Mac OS".

Suggestion to the Slashcode developers: add something like this in the next release!


$rh = $db->query("SELECT s FROM stories WHERE s.category = $newArticle{category}");
while ($rh->fetch()) {
$c = isect(@{$newArticle{keywords}}, @{$_{keywords}});
warnMsg("This article looks like $_{name} (at $_{url}), with $c matched keywords.\n") if $c >= $SOME_ARBITRARY_CONSTANT;
}


(Ghod, I still remember some of this stupid database programming... I've been trying to forget the horrible memories for half a year now. Urgh.)

Re:Random considerations

[tbo]

The Classic environment is just a modified version of Blue Box (a.k.a. MacOS.app in Mac OS X Server). Apps run at about 95% of the speed they would on a native Mac system. This is on the developer previews, of course, performance may change...

The cool part is that Classic takes advantage of Mac OS X's superior (to Mac OS 9) memory management, so the Mac OS 9 running in Classic thinks it has a gig of RAM or something crazy like that (exactly how much depends on a bunch of factors).

I think Apple's UFS is a bit different that the normal UFS. HFS+ is the default filesystem for Mac OS X, but, if you're a developer, you want a UFS partition because a few Unix programs break when compiling on HFS+ (due to case issues: HFS+ preserves case but is not case-sensitive, so moof.c and Moof.c cannot coexist).