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Review of the BSD part of MacOS X Beta
gbooker writes " Deamon News has an interesting article about the BSD core of MacOS X Beta. They talk about how it differs from the traditional MacOS AND how it differs from BSD. This is the first installment of what could be an interesting series."
Just because Mac OS X has BSD components doesn't mean that it needs to be compared to every other BSD out there. We went thru all of this in the late 80's with NeXTstep/OpenStep. Mac OS X is essentially OpenStep with display pdf (rather than postscript), updated media layers, and Mac app compatibility layers. It's not intended to be a killer replacement for xBSD, it never was.
It all sounded quite fascinating, except for when I got to the point that you need to reboot the computer in order to make certain changes. Even stranger was that the changes wouldn't take effect until GUI portion was loaded.
The author of the article has probably never touched a NeXT system (or a PC, SPARC, or HP box running OpenStep). NetInfo is not new, it's over 10 years old and well documented. Properly implemented on a network it makes life soooooo much easier. Please, before you compare NeXTstep/OpenStep/Rhapsody/MacOSX to your favorite flavor of BSD, do some research on NeXTstep and NetInfo. It makes a lot more sense if you have a real interstanding of why things are the way they are.
Try this link for some pointers and URLs:
http://204.214.75.123/next/index.html
> However, if you make changes to your IP address/DNS/etc. settings, you are informed that you must restart for the changes to take effect. Even if this stuff is 'hard-wired' into the NetInfo setup, it should only require a re-HUP of NetInfo for this to change, not a restart.
/etc/syslogd.conf (instead of systlogd) after changing it.
Profound misunderstanding here. Netinfo only holds the information. re-HUP of netinfo make as much sense as saying re-HUP
The reason why a reboot is required is that the various configuration are made at boot time, based on info extracted from the netinfo database. He probably could skip the reboot by relaunching the correct scripts.
The best thing about netinfo is that it is hierarchical, ie: that you can have network-level configuration on a 'master server', whith every little bit customised in your local net-info database.
There exist a port of netinfo for linux. Lost the pointer, but I may dig it up if needed...
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
I wonder if Macs will become standard issue to the web hsoting community. Designers already love them, and admins are just screaming for more power to their *nix like boxes. With all of the hardware power that Apple has been putting in their boxes, does this make OSX the perfect box? What about performance compared to a Linux box running on a P3 Intel box? Where the software is free mind you.
Nate
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
If you, like most other Internet server admins with a fully-functional brain stem, prefer Unix over the NT kernel, then Mac OS X will be the first true consumer OS that you will ever feel comfortable with.
Come on, do we really need to take cheap shots like this? If you ask me, any "server admin with a fully-functional brain stem" would use the tool that best fits the job, even if that means (gasp) NT. Like it or not, Windows is better for some things. Personally I prefer UNIX systems, but that doesn't mean it should be my way or the highway (perhaps the corniest cliche ever uttered).
Is it just me who's tired of the "My OS can beat up your OS" wars?
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
I boot up with an athlon 1ghz and 256 megs of ram into windows 98, and it lags to the point of a crawl
With all due respect, but this not indicate to speed of the Mac, but the fact that you did not "Tweak" Windows correctly. When I boot up my Celeron 450 with 64 MB Ram, WinMe takes less time to load than the Bios. The next time your Winblowz install slows to a crawl, you might want to take a look in
HKEY_LOCAL MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Run
All the crap in there is ran automatically at bootup, also all the crap you thought is uninstalled.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Hmmm.. So Mac OSX = BSD + Nice GUI. And the article reveals that (modulo freely available dev tools) it's a full BSD port.
So... I can use Linux/BSD + XFree + KDE/Gnome and play the Catchup-with-continuous-development game, or I can get a nice shiny easy to use Mac, get the benefit of (theoretically) 15 yrs worth of legacy Apps, *and* the cutting-edge of Open software fresh from the labs.
Is this is future of UNIX-for-the-masses?
--
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
I see that AOLserver (www.aolserver.com) now has a binary for Mac OS X Public Beta. As does Apache (1.3.X, cross compiled for PPC & Intel for OS X and Darwin). Now if Oracle would only port Oracle 9 to OS X...
It's well known that Jobs uses both Toshiba and IBM laptops running NeXTstep/OpenStep (the OS made by his former company, NeXT... the basis of Mac OS X). His presentations are often run off his personal laptop and he bought some of his recent machines preconfigured by Bifrost Workstations (see link at http://www.beyondboxes.com/next/).
While the GUI is still sluggish for me, everything else about the OS has been wicked fast. I haven't done any benchmarks, but as far as my daily work (compiling, running scripts, etc) it feels MUCH faster than any other box I have around.
Slashdot apparently pissed off Apple, they've got /.hidden!
Thimo
--
Avoid the Gates of Hell. Use Linux!
While NetInfo has write privilages, it doesn't have rea privilages. This allows anybody to view the rood passwd, which is a simple crypt hash.
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>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
Note that Apple tried to venture into the enterprise market a few years back with some "larger" servers, but this effort was a total failure.
excerpt from article:
"The genius of NetInfo is that it provides a uniform way of accessing and manipulating all system and network configuration information."
Maybe I'm missing something, but I fail to see any ingenuity here. Granted, these guys are good enough to admit they aren't hard-core, old-school sysadmins, but still... NIS/NIS+ have been answering this question for years now. Despite any failings you might cite about yp, netinfo hardly seems like an improvement.
The nsswitch mechanism, present on almost every unix these days, allows you to map {passwd, shadow, group, hosts, services, mail aliases, etc.} against {dns, local files, nis, etc} transparently as you see fit. If your system doesn't support host or password lookups against an LDAP database (as glibc-2.1 now does), there's a good chance you can build a module...
OK, having a central, common, consistent facility for everything sounds "nice", right? This flies in the face of the unix-credo: "Every tool should do one thing well". When confronted with a scredriver and pliers, do you complain: "You mean this one works by turning and that one works by squeezing?" No. This, to me, is akin to complaining about having multiple formats for '/etc/passwd' and dns zone files.
When I read about doing name-service (esp. passwd) stuff from files in single user mode and via some external service during multiuser mode, I almost choked. Local files aren't consulted when you're connected to a remote netinfo server? (Unix answers the question with the '/etc/nsswitch.conf' entry hosts: files nis or similar.) This essentially means that some external machine can tell you who root, wheel, localhost and shutdown are. I don't know if this is a horrible oversight, a design flaw, or some kludge to avoid implementing a real nsswitch. This is not a feature, its a bug. It begs questions about what other kludges will be used to patch it up.
It sounds to me like Apple has re-invented the wheel, and in fine tradtion, decided to make it different for the sake of being different.
I'll stick with my round wheels, thank you.
void rbowles(int signature)
{
signal(signature, rbowles);
raise(signature);
/* MAGIC THEATRE
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY
MADMEN ONLY */
Apple's AIX-based, large format servers were well-recieved, but overpriced and poorly marketed (Apple targeted education and publishing -- audiences that at the time had no idea what Unix was, let alone the AIX flavor). AIX media wasn't included nor was any administration software. After a minor speedbump, the Apple Network Servers disappeared.
As for a clone server, "Apple is a hardware company" and any sort of licensing would end up costing both parties more than it would be worth. Buuuutttt... why couldn't Apple make an ATX PowerMac G4 board based on the UMA1 or UMA2 chipset? They could sell it at a price where they would be making money but low enough to make it worthwhile for end-users and VARs to customize. Sun does it.
Not to be too sharply critical of your criticism, but the article says "It's interesting to note that, as befits the NeXT heritage of NetInfo, many of the NetInfo-related man pages are dated 1989." And the article contains a link to Apple's tech note on NetInfo.
Please, do read the student's writing completely before criticizing him for not doing his homework. :)
Um.. maybe it's so that the user can enable the functionality if they want it, without having to recompile the kernel? It seems very reasonable to me that MacOS X's target market will be people who might want things like firewalls, but also might not want to get too dirty. Enabling stuff in the kernel and then shipping it with config files that don't use those features by default, seems like the Right Thing to do if you want easy configurability.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Will someone also be doing a review on the MS-DOS portion of Windows?
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
Well, we can all be sure of one thing; OS X will have a much better memory management structure than OS9, but it'll crash a whole lot more than BSD. Which, in the end, will mean diddly-squat when it comes to actually running programs.
Remember, this is about the workstation version of OS X, not the server version. Therefore, the focus is to be on overall stability and performance in foreground applications, not background processes (ftpd and the like). Bottom line: if OS X crashes while running Photoshop or Final Cut Pro, it will be a laughable failure for Apple and their workstation OS.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Then again, if tenon's xtools were free in its final release, as it now is in beta...or some other coca-x server wrapper library that was free is implemented, osx users could get the best of both worlds.
Granted, newbies aren't going to be out there compiling new apps right and left, but we experienced users can...and then post the binaries, or write small installers, and then...osx==gnu/mac hybrid.
that's my plan for my next box!
Not until Apple ships a dual capable mobo with integrated 100 bit or 1000 bit ethernet and integrated video, so that either they or someone else can slap them into 1U enclosures
Apple's current G4 motherboards are all dual-processor capable, and the G4's also include Gigabit ethernet now, and thier older motherboards (Beige G3) also included integrated video.
Re:Will this catch on in the web hosting community (Score:1) by um... Lucas (lk@caralis.com) on Friday November 03, @09:33AM PDT (#176) (User #13147 Info) http://www.dioxidized.com/ Not until Apple ships a dual capable mobo with integrated 100 bit or 1000 bit ethernet and integrated video, so that either they or someone else can slap them into 1U enclosures. Because right now, you can fit 13 or 14 cobalt raq's into the space required by 3 or 4 G4's. So it's not really a winning proposition that way. At some point a while back, some outfit was shipping 1U enclosures for iMac motherboards,
I believe that outfit was Marathon Computers. They also will mount your B&W G3/G4 into a 4U rack (that's still pretty big).
Doh!
Also, having used a message-passing kernel, they don't seem to be doing much with it. I would have expected heavy use of IPC. But then, Apple killed OpenDoc, which was the only thing they made that really needed IPC.
Are you sure you meant mach 2.5???
all the marketing guff I've found proudly proclaims the use of Mach 3.0 and Bsd 4.4...
I was pretty sure that the last openstep (4.2) relied upon mach 2.5.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
I remembered this one after using my mom's Win95 machine and having media player crash on me: In Win2K, a program which uses MMSYSTEM that ends up crashing will not kill the sound. Instead, MMSYSTEM is restarted instantly. Also, you can run MULTIPLE INSTANCES of MMSYSTEM (i.e.: run Winamp, RealPlayer, Media Player, and Cool Edit all at once!). DirectSound is still first come, first served, but that's how it was meant to be.
DOS box log! You're not trapped in 80x25 anymore; there's now a buffer in each DOS box, and you can scroll up to previous lines (excellent for doing that >200 line tracert!)
The most stable Direct3D support. Great for 3DSMAX, Unreal Tournament, The Sims, and other D3D programs.
All calls to OPENGL32.DLL are redirected to the hardware accelerator (unless the software RGB emulator is specified). This includes the OpenGL screensavers, which run MUCH faster due to this.
Integrating IE into the operating system isn't all that bad. You can just type a URL into the path, and that Windows Explorer window turns into an IE window. This is one great timesaver.
File system advances: FAT32 support (though you can't format a volume larger than 32GB as FAT32, since NTFS is more efficient at that point), disk quotas, and per-file encryption.
By default, upon a STOP error (blue screen of death), only the first 640K of RAM is dumped, and the system is automatically restarted (not like NT4, where all RAM was dumped and the system would stay at the BSOD until the user restarted). This can be changed to your liking, but 2000 usually only goes to the BSOD when running corrupt programs.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
By default, upon a STOP error (blue screen of death), only the first 640K of RAM is dumped, and the system is automatically restarted (not like NT4, where all RAM was dumped and the system would stay at the BSOD until the user restarted). This can be changed to your liking, but 2000 usually only goes to the BSOD when running corrupt programs
... care to fill in a clueless W2k user on how to stop W2k from moving past a BSOD too fast?
HOW do you change this? I think I have a corrupt video driver on my laptop which causes these crashes, but the damned thing keeps rebooting before I can get to the pause key
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Umm, neither BeOS nor QNX are dead. And both are decidedly microkernel (in QNX even drivers run as seperate processes) and can whip Linux's (or MOSX's) ass in the speed deparment.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Obviously a non-gamer. Computer games are quite different from console games. For example, computer RPGs tend to be much more strategy oriented, but less story focused than their console counterparts. PC sports games tend to have more statistics while console sports games tend to be "lighter." PC sims can get really hardcore while console sims tend to be much more arcade-like. PC arcade games tend to generally suck while console arcade games are quite good. Its a mixture of market segment (PC gamers tend to be older and more affluent), tradition, and technology (try playing Jane's F15 without a keyboard!)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Some games will never work on consoles without a keyboard, and I don't see a keyboard in the PS/2s future. The demographics of the two markets are very different, regardless of the technology. There have been times when consoles were significantly more powerful than PCs (when the N64 was released, full scene anti-aliasing was still a pipe dream for PC users) yet that did nothing to raise change the demographics of the situation. It will take a lot to pry the RTS/FPS/Flight Sim crowd from their PCs, and it will take a lot to get the Arcade/RPG/Puzzle gamers to give up their consoles.
As for fast OpenGL, who said anything about games? I'm talking OpenGL 3D development.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...