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Interview Jordan Hubbard, Apple's BSD Tech Manager

Posted by Hemos on from the talk-to-the-man-with-the-plan dept.

Stigmata669 writes "Over at MacSlash the editors have managed to schedule an interview with Jordan Hubbard, Engineering Manager of the BSD Technology Group at Apple to answer questions about BSD, and Darwin in the context of Mac OS X. The interview is being conducted in the Slashdot style, so comment and in a week they will have the highest moderated comments answered. The specific article is here."

3 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Don't expect any criticisms to get permitted by jbolden · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Those aren't the sorts of issues I'm talking about. I can understand why those get modded down; they are obvious trolls.

    I'll give you my most recent example from yesterday. There was a discussion of clustering and I stated that I didn't believe clustering was a useful short term objective for Apple because:

    a) Its expensive, i.e. outside the range of hardware Apple normally sells
    b) It requires a great deal of skill of implement properly, i.e. ease of use is not important to people implementing clustering
    c) Its generally meant for mission critical applications; and few of any of these are generally run on Apple hardware.

    This got modded offtopic. Now I certainly can understand someone disagreeing with me and believing that clustering would be useful as a near term objective (though I have yet to hear any good reason; the closest I got was a guy who had a reason based on not knowing the distinction between distributed processing and clustering). I can't understand the reason for this being modded down.

    Absolutely I consider this simple bias. Nonsense which is pro apple gets modded up and good stuff which is seen as anti (and frankly I didn't really consider this to be anti) gets modded down. This has nothing to do with performance issues, or whether Apple costs an extra $200 or so.

  2. Server stuff by Mr.+Protocol · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Most of Mac OS X is FreeBSD, with Mach underpinnings to do the machine-dependent stuff. Memory management is also done by Mach. How does Mach's memory management stack up against the VM system in straight FreeBSD?

  3. Server Stuff, part 2 by Mr.+Protocol · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Apple's going after the server market in a big way, for the first time in Apple's history. Mac OS X Server is their flagship (heck, their only) product in that department, and you'd think with FreeBSD's popularity, it'd be a slam dunk.

    But on closer inspection, we see that the file system used in Mac OS X is, preferentially, HFS+. Now, UFS/FFS (aka the file system as performed by Kirk McKusick) has been tuned to within an inch of its life for close to 20 years to be able to do this, whereas, as far as I can tell, HFS+ is a) proprietary and b) hasn't ever been used seriously as a server file system before, having lived most of its life on desktops.

    Soooooooooo...... what's with HFS+? How much of a performance hit, if any, do we take in using it instead of UFS? What would we see if we benchmarked the two of them in an "average" server?