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OpenDarwin 7.2.1 Released

Posted by timothy on from the true-to-their-word dept.

Ed Waldmire writes "I am pleased to annouce to the /. community that the OpenDarwin community has released OpenDarwin 7.2.1. This release corresponds to Mac OS X 10.3.2 and includes many bugfixes and additions. Most notable are ncutil, YUM, and a tulip NIC driver."

7 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. POSIX? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I could care less about actual certification, but does anyone know how POSIX compliant this release is? Last I heard, Darwin had about 99% of the POSIX APIs.

  2. Darwin on x86 -- QUESTIONS by MikeCapone · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How's Darwin on x86? Does it have any advantages over other BSDs or Linux? Does it do things much differently? Is the hardware support lacking?

    I'm very curious about it.

    --
    Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
    1. Re:Darwin on x86 -- QUESTIONS by cremes · · Score: 5, Interesting

      There is no advantage to opendarwin on x86 over the others mentioned. It's maintained primarily to act as a way to validate that code is written correctly (by compiling for two different architectures and verifying it doesn't expose any bugs).

      OpenDarwin isn't intended to be very speedy and reliable on x86 hardware. We have FreeBSD for that.

      OpenDarwin isn't intended to support every x86 motherboard or weird peripheral. We have NetBSD for that.

      OpenDarwin isn't intended to be the most secure OS out there. We have OpenBSD for that.

      OpenDarwin isn't intended to form the center of a large and growing religious cult. We have Linux for that. :-)

      Use OpenDarwin if you want to check out the foundation upon which OSX is built. It has some very cool technologies that other OSs do not.

      For example, it replaces rc.* scripts (BSD) and run-levels (SysV) with SystemStarter. Second, the driver model was designed with OOP in mind and has been branded I/OKit. Third, instead of littering the filesystem with lots of "dot-files" it uses the SystemConfiguration framework to store configurations.

      Using OpenDarwin-x86 + GNUStep + WindowMaker (or AfterStep) gets you a machine that looks like OSX on x86.

      Take a look. You might like what you find.

      cr

    2. Re:Darwin on x86 -- QUESTIONS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'm with you on this one. I installed Darwin on an x86 box a year or so ago to have a look at it. Seeing that Apple logo come up on a PC screen was a moment I'll savour. Is there anyone out there trying to get an aqua clone to run on top of it? I'd pay some good money to have apple software on PC. PDA too.

    3. Re:Darwin on x86 -- QUESTIONS by cremes · · Score: 2, Interesting

      True, but I believe the "unwritten, no promises" plan is for even that rc.* script to go away. Shouldn't take much more to eliminate it altogether.

      cr

  3. Is BSM implemented? by alangmead · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The other day, I was looking around the Darwin kernel code and I saw references to BSM support in kern_audit.c and the like. But I couldn't find any userspace utilities designed to enable or extract information for the kernel's audit log. Am I missing something? or is this just a stub that is being filled in as they go along?

  4. Re:Can somebody test it under vmware3? by Nermal6693 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I haven't tried under VMware, but a see that this new version of OpenDarwin includes a tulip driver. I find that interesting because Virtual PC emulates a tulip card. So maybe it works under Virtual PC.