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Darwin vs. MacOS and its relationship to BSD

Posted by AilleCat on from the bsd-or-not-to-bsd dept.

Daemon News has this article on Darwin, its relationship to MacOS X and BSD operating systems, and its possible longevity as an Open Source project. I'm personally interested in the technical aspects of Darwin, given that its kernel is related to Mach, with some enhancements coming from BSD, I'm not sure if this makes it a true BSD OS, or some kind of distant cousin.

1 of 14 comments (clear)

  1. What it is by AntiBasic · · Score: 5
    Note: The point below is to note that MacOSX is not a new flavour of unix, it's a new major version increment of NeXTSTEP. Note the internal version number consistancy. On MacOSX Server,

    `uname -s` == "Rhapsody", `uname -r` == "5.7".

    MacOSX = Rhapsody 5.7+ Rhapsody = OPENSTEP for Mach (product code name change as of Apple buyout) OPENSTEP for Mach = NeXTSTEP (product name change as of Sun-NeXT co-released OpenStep spec.)

    therefore (transitive property)

    MacOSX = NeXTSTEP

    The series, each of which is comprised of some version of Mach, BSD, Display Postscript, and Objective-C Frameworks:

    NeXTSTEP 1.x -4.4BSD-lite -Mach 2.5 -DPS -Objective-C + Appkit Framework

    NeXTSTEP 2.x -4.4BSD-lite -Mach 2.5 + extensions -DPS -Objective-C + Appkit Framework

    NeXTSTEP 3.0..3.3 -4.4BSD-lite -Mach 2.5 + more extensions -DPS -Obj-C + Appkit + Foundation Kit (early kit)

    OPENSTEP 4.0..4.2 -4.4BSD-lite -Mach 2.5 + more extensions -DPS -Obj-C + New OpenStep frameworks + EOF

    Rhapsody 5.x (Early Apple prototype) -4.4-lite -Mach 2.5 + blah blah -DPS -Obj-C + OpenStep core frameworks (Codenamed Yellowbox) + extensions + EOF

    MacOSX Server 1.x (Rhapsody 5.7) same as the above, but stabler.

    MacOSX 1.x (Rhapsody 5.x [where x -4.4BSD-lite -Mach 3 + fidly bits -DisplayPDF (Quartz) -Obj-C + enhanced OpenStep frameworks (Now called Cocoa) + EOF

    BSD bits were taken from NetBSD and FreeBSD, with (I thought) some userland from OpenBSD. EOF = Enterprise Object Framework - an Object-to-Relational Database adapter layer (very very good.)