Slashdot Mirror
iPhone Not Running OS X
rochlin writes "We know that Steve Jobs has said the iPhone won't accept third-party apps. The iPhone looks to be running on a Samsung provided ARM core processor. That means it's not running on an Intel (or PPC) core. That means it's not running OS X in any meaningful sense (Apple can brand toilet paper as running OS X if they like). Darwin, the BSD based operating system that underlies what Apple has previously been calling OS X, does not run on ARM processors. The Darwin / Apple Public Source licensing agreement says the source would have to be made available if it is modified and sold (paraphrased; read it yourself). A Cingular rep has said the iPhone version of the OS source will not be made available. It will be closed, like the iPod OS and not like Darwin. So if it ain't Darwin, it ain't OS X (in any meaningful way). An InfoWorld article on an FBR Research report breaks down iPhone component providers and lists Samsung as the chip maker for the main application / video cpu. So, that leaves the question... What OS is this phone really running? Not Linux or the source would need to be open."
Its running Vista. Thats why its not available for a few months, Apple are waiting for the first service pack to be released.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Apple's the copyright holder... APSL doesn't apply to them, it only applies to people who download XNU from their website Apple can do whatever they please with their code, it's their code
Last things first: Apple doesn't have to abide by the APSL with respect to their own code.
Second, if it's "OS X" on PPC, and "OS X" on Intel, why wouldn't it be "OS X" on ARM? It could well come from the very same code base, simply an unreleased branch.
I think you are confusing OSX with Mac OSX. Mac OSX is the OS that Apple sell and put on their computers. At no point in the Keynote or after has anyone said that the iPhone runs Mac OSX. They have simply said that it runs OSX. To my mind this means that it is running a subset of Mac OSX. At the very least the iPhone OSX appears to be missing Carbon (no loss to me), the Finder and other "built in" apps and quite possibly Quicktime. Whilst Steve said it had Cocoa that normally just refferrs to the main Kits: Foundation and the App Kit. This does not include PDFKit, QTKit and so on.
Whether is's based off Darwin or not is hard to say. At a certain level that does not matter. What would matter if Apple decide to open up to third part developers is the APIs that are available. There may be a small subset that want POSIX on their phone but for actual application development Cocoa with some custom PhoneKit is probably all that is important.
1) Apple isn't affected by the APSL in this way. The APSL affects 3rd parties that contribute, use or modify the source that Apple makes available. It doesn't require Apple to make source or changes to source available.
2) Mac OS X is portable. It already runs on x86, x86-64, ppc, and ppc64. It looks like Apple has it running on ARM ISA (not sure exactly which) given statements by Apple.
Exactly which aspects of XNU, IOKit, BSD layer, user-land frameworks, etc. that make up "OS X" are running on the iPhone is unknown (Cocoa has been stated to exist by Apple, which implies a handful of other frameworks also exist). It is also possible that something other then XNU is being used... but I doubt that... much more likely it is has been slimmed down to exactly what the iPhone needs.
Apple own and hold copyright on Darwin, they released their own code under APSL for YOU to use and YOU to give modifications back (i.e. this is their license protection for you making a commercial OS X clone)
They can do whatever THEY like to it and never release the source, just like any GPL code author is free (under the terms of the GPL, even) to relicense their code for any party they see fit (BSD, APSL, whatever). It is up to the author and the copyright holder, if they are even in fact different people. Apple are both!
So OS X doesn't run on ARM? Why not? Because OpenDarwin doesn't? This whole article is horseshit speculation and a completely random nonsense of misunderstanding how software licensing works, who wrote and owns Darwin (Apple!) and the technical aspects involved (they've been working on the iPhone for the better part of a year and a half.. that's plenty of time to do a port to a new processor, especially given how abstracted the Darwin kernel is, XNU Apple additions and so on)
Any chance we could, like, wait for the iPhone to be, you know, actually released before we make definitive statements on what OS it is or isn't running? Right now, the only people who have any idea what OS is really running on the iPhone are the people who worked on it; I'm taking a wild guess here that you're not one of them.
Sure, I understand it's going to be a long six months with nothing but speculation to keep us warm at night. But let's keep in mind that, until we get our hands on the iPhone, it's speculation only, not knowledge.
Just search for "iPhone" in jobs.apple.com:
t ernal.showJob&RID=4241&CurrentPage=1)
Bluetooth/Wifi SW Engineer - iPhone
[...]
MacOS X / IOKit driver development experience
Mach IPC and/or Mach Server design experience
[...]
Solid understanding of embedded hardware platforms (ARM processors, SDIO, UARTs, etc
(http://jobs.apple.com/index.ajs?BID=1&method=mEx
I'm friends with some of the people on the iPhone team. Before I knew about the iPhone, i constantly heard about radical ways to strip down OS X to make it run meaner and leaner and make sure it runs on "limited hardware". I assumed they were working on some sort of PVR or something, but clearly I was wrong. I'm fairly sure that lots of the code written is in CoreFoundation and they ARE using Mac OS X frameworks (stripped down to have only the functionality they need) - but the kernel may something completely new.
"The Darwin / Apple Public Source licensing agreement says the source would have to be made available if it is modified and sold (paraphrased; read it yourself). A Cingular rep has said the iPhone version of the OS source will not be made available. It will be closed, like the iPod OS and not like Darwin. So if it ain't Darwin, it ain't OS X (in any meaningful way). An InfoWorld article on an FBR Research report breaks down iPhone component providers and lists Samsung as the chip maker for the main application / video cpu. So, that leaves the question... What OS is this phone really running? Not Linux or the source would need to be open."
We know that Windows CE does not use the NT kernel. This means that it is not using the same kernel as Windows XP and Windows Server. That means that WIndows CE is not Windows in any any meaningful sense. (Microsoft could brand toilet paper as running Windows if they like.) The NT kernel, the Mach-like microkernel that underlies what Microsoft has been calling Windows since the end of DOS, does not run on mobile phones or PocketPCs. The Microsoft Windows EULA is totally proprietary, and its source is carefully controlled. A Verizon Wireless rep said he had no idea what I was talking about. The WinCE source code is closed, like that of the Zune or XBox, and not like Linux. Now, Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Why would a Wookiee, an eight-foot tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! So, obviously, the iPhone is not running Windows CE, and must therefore be running Mac OS X 10.7 "Sabretooth."
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
Looks like it really is a scaled-down version of Mac OS X. From Macworld Expo:
c fm?newsid=16927
The iPhone is running an optimised but full version of OS X that weighs in at "considerably less" than half a GB, according to Apple vice president of worldwide iPod marketing Greg Joswiak.
Joswiak confirmed that the operating system sits in the flash memory of the device and that Apple will "provide updates to the operating system like we do today."
Joswiak claimed that the reduced size of the operating system was a result of expertise of the team at Apple, rather than cutting out functionality or removing core technologies. "Remember that OS X on a Mac features a lot of applications that we don't have to ship on the iPhone," he added.
http://www.macworld.co.uk/ipod-itunes/news/index.
Jobs+Wozniak=Joswiak?
---
1. Here are the iPhone components according to FRB Research via arstechnica:
- Samsung Electronics for the CPU/Video processing
- Marvell for the 802.11 chipset
- Infineon Technologies for baseband communications
- Broadcomm Corp. for the touch screen controllers
- Cambridge Silicon Radio for the Bluetooth chipset
2. Darwin is an open source core based on FreeBSD according to Apple, Inc..
3. Here is freebsd on ARM processors (intel-based). ARM FreeBSD.
4. Why is it tough to believe that Apple would simply recompile necessary components of Darwin on the ARM processors and then include and compile the necessary (and only the necessary!) mid level libraries? Many existing apps would work with only minor modifications (to take into account the new control scheme) and a recompile.