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FreeBSD Support for AMD64 On the Way

Posted by michael on from the if-i-had-a-hammer dept.

BSD Forums writes "FreeBSD operating system is making progress towards support for several 64bit platforms. FreeBSD 5.0 introduced SPARC64 and IA64 (Itanium) to its list of platforms and AMD64 is likely to be added in version 5.2."

2 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. Re:correction by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As far as I know OS X is based on NEXT, and a bit of FreeBSD userland (It depends who you ask).

    Darwin (the underpinnings of MacOS X) is based on a Mach MicroKernel kinda semi-bound to a BSD "server" in kernel space. Mach handles the low level hardware, the BSD server handles the other normal interactions you'd expect from a Unix.

    The BSD server is actually ahybrid. From what I remember, they started off as more NetBSDish, then got more and more FreeBSDish. They seem to be tracking FreeBSD more and more now. I'm not sure what the userland is.

    On top of that, you're allowed to have other "servers" as they're called in MicroKernel land. There's a Classic server which is all MacOS 9 and under. The NeXT part is the Cocoa server. And there's obviously Carbon which is essentially for "native" MacOS X apps.

  2. Re:correction correction by The+Ego · · Score: 2, Interesting

    No, Mac OS X does _not_ allow for multiple servers in the Mach 3 sense.

    Darwin is a monolithic kernel where BSD is wedded to the Mach services (bound, not semi-bound). Cocoa and Carbon are purely user-space entities. Classic does have some support in the kernel but it is _not_ a server in the Mach sense, and it is also mostly a user-space thing.

    From following the Darwin mailing lists, you seem quite correct regarding the BSD lineage. Early MacOS X builds had more of a NetBSD lineage and that shifted to FreeBSD over time. Userland is closest to FreeBSD IIRC.

    Hopefully this post won't require a correction^3.