An Introduction To And History of Darwin

proclus writes "Roberto Donhert of Aqua icon theme fame (screenshot) has written a concise review of Darwin OS. The article covers the origin and evolution of Darwin OS, as well as the various Darwin distributions that are available for PowerPC and x86 architectures. OSnews has the story. The only thing that I would add is the contributions of Torrey Lyons of XonX, who created the XDarwin Xserver that made so much of this possible. BTW, Roberto also has a commentary about the SCO situation running at OSnews."

Comments

Common Mistake

[dhovis]

Roberto made one common mistake in his writeup on Darwin. Darwin does not use a pure Mach kernel. It uses a kernel called xnu. Xnu is a hybrid kernel containing Mach message passing code, but also a lot of BSD stuff. Xnu isn't quite monolithic, but it isn't a microkernel either. The BSD stuff was added into the kernel space to improve performance over pure Mach.

Re:Common Mistake

[dhovis]

I believe that Apple's long discarded "Copland" next generation OS had a kernel that was called NuKernel. Some of that code was probably merged into the OS X kernel, hence xnu. Remember that Apple used to sell Macs with NuBus expasion slots.

Re:I swear to Jesus that I am not trolling.

[Sentry21]

What is the advantage to gnu-darwin over FreeBSD

You can run the same OS (theoretically) on x86 and PPC? It's a nicer system (opinion)? FreeBSD sucks (opinion)? The FreeBSD 'help' is usually more abusive than helpful (experience)?

or GNU/Linux?

Linux has all kinds of problems (every time I try to compile Linux, it gets about 30 seconds into make bzImage and errors out). Don't want to be associated with Linux zealots? Linux can be a pain to run on PPC? You can run the same (command-line) apps on GNU-Darwin as on OS X?

If it's IOKit & Mach that give you a hardon, then what's the advantage of gnu-darwin over GNU/Hurd?

Darwin doesn't use Mach? Darwin's actually usable at this point? Darwin has drivers for hardware supported by OS X? Darwin works on PPC (does Hurd)?

Hack value?

Just some ideas. Personally, I'd use Open Darwin, but there's always reasons. The question people should be asking isn't 'Why?' but rather 'Why not?'

--Dan

Re:I swear to Jesus that I am not trolling.

[Ranger Rick]

GNU-Darwin just happens to be the best-selling UNIX on the market today mostly because of the Mac OS X GUI layer running on top of it.

No matter how much the GNU-Darwin people want you to think otherwise, Apple (more specifically OpenDarwin and people in the BSD group at Apple) are the ones doing all the work on Darwin.

It's amazing Shantonu even bothers making the OpenDarwin distribution anymore when the GNU-Darwin folks immediately start reselling it at a $15 premium (check the timestamps on those e-mails...).