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Apple Businesses Operating Systems BSD

Interview Jordan Hubbard, Apple's BSD Tech Manager 59

Posted by Hemos 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."
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Interview Jordan Hubbard, Apple's BSD Tech Manager More

Interview Jordan Hubbard, Apple's BSD Tech Manager

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  • Does Apple want to penetrate new markets, and grow their market share? It seems to me, an Apple outsider, that they do not.

    Apple has a wonderful product, especially for engineers doing digital signal processing (DSP) and/or embedded processing work. The Altivec just blows away the Pentium and the Athlon for DSP and low power consumption (FLOPS/Watt). It is a fantastic advantage to have the same CPU on your desktop that is in the system you are developing for.

    However, Apple's product is not so wonderful from an Apple Outsider's view. Apple seems to be sticking to some of their historical design decisions (one-button mouse, laptop ADB keyboards) for mostly "religious" reasons. I understand that Apple must keep their existing customer base, but there is an entirely new customer base (Engineers doing DSP and /or embedded development) now possible that Apple seems to be ignoring. I believe Apple could target this new market without sacrificing their current graphic designer market.

    The new potential market has a huge amount of legacy development on traditional Unix systems that they do not want to abandon. They want to be able to use all of their X-Window programs (bad as they are), their vi and emacs editors [with the Ctrl key in the right place], etc. Therefore, if Apple wants to target this market, they must provide choice. If Apple wants the Unix/DSP/Engineering market, they need to reduce the impediments for those people to "switch".

    Here are a few things Apple could do to accelerate the switch and gain themselves additional market share:

    • Produce laptops with both 3-button and 1-button mice, to be chosen by the user at purchase time.
    • Produce a laptop with a built-in modern USB keyboard that can be totally re-mapped according to the user's desire.
    • Produce systems that give the user a choice between "Mac Look-and-Feel" and "Traditional Unix Look-and-Feel" when the system is first powered up and/or when the OS is first installed.

    If Apple did any of those things, they would appeal to the experienced Unix/DSP/Embedded Engineers, and open up a new market for themselves. Why not try to capture this market away from HP/Sun/IBM/etc.?? Why not pursue this strategy in light of the fact that Apple will likely have even higher margins selling into the Unix/DSP/Embedded/Engineering Market than they do selling to their current (and small) market?

    • A couple things from an Apple User. 1.Apple seems to be sticking to some of their historical design decisions (one-button mouse, laptop ADB keyboards). Nope. Apple uses USB for all it's keyboards and mice. Yes they still have the one button mouse, but the keyboard can be remapped at will (in fact you can get DVORAK for OS X pretty easy off VersionTracker.) ADB connectors for mice and keyboards are available, but hard to come by since Apple ditched that standard in 1998. 2.Produce systems that give the user a choice between "Mac Look-and-Feel" and "Traditional Unix Look-and-Feel" when the system is first powered up and/or when the OS is first installed. You already can. Hold down the Apple (command key is the "real" name for it) and the S key at start up. This allows you to start from the command line and the GUI will not load on the computer. Launching X-windows from this environment is pretty easy, or any other GUI that runs on Darwin is pretty easy, though getting such environments is not as easy as going to Veriontracker and d/ling them. 3.Why not try to capture this market away from HP/Sun/IBM/etc.?? Have you looked at Apple's Open Source partners? much less their hardware partners? IBM makes the G3 and probably will be putting the Power 4 in next years towers. Sun got Open Office to work on a port for OS X so that Office v.X wasn't our only industrial office suite. HP had print drivers out of the gate on day 1 for OS X. These groups are supportting OS X with their help. Apple can be a bit crazy at times, but they rarely bite the hands that feed them. 4. and Lastly : if using a one button mouse and having to use both hands on one computer are such a problem for you, then buy a different mouse. if you just sank $1500 to 3000 on a new computer, will the $15 for a two-button USB mouse really kill you? When I switched to the Mac a year and a half ago, I constantly tried to right click. Then I realized I always have two hands. With the control and command keys I had many more options, and a finer control than I did with two buttons. try it some time and you may like it.

    • First, OS X supports two-button-mice *natively*. You can buy any non-apple off-the-shelf two-button USB laser mouse for ultra cheap and plug it in any not-too-old mac laptop's *two* USB ports. If there is a 3-button USB mouse out there, i bet you it'll just work on a mac laptop (or desktop), in the worst case you might have to install a vendor-supplied driver.

      Apple hardware has *for years* supported USB peripherals, and that includes mice AND keyboards.

      ADB serial ports for keyboards have been gone for a WHILE. As far as keyboard remapping, there [gnufoo.org] is [wiredfool.com] a slew [earthlink.net] of 3rd party OSX shareware and "how-to's" [mac.com] out [mac.com] there [earthlink.net] that'll help you do just that. Keep in mind that the Alpha Geek Community is switching in *strides* over to OS X, thereby building a very strong support-base. Check out a couple [slashdot.org] of my switching experience [slashdot.org] stories [slashdot.org] to give you a small idea of *some* of the slew of cool things you can do with OS X.

      Futhermore, Apple hardware has been increasingly following mainstream peripheral and other device specifications: VGA monitor ports, ATA drive controllers, PCI extension slots. You can pretty-much buy a mac, gut it out, and fill-it up with non-apple components. But at least you have a base system that *just works*, and works well at that.

      Please define "Unix Look and Feel". Are you talking about Solaris CDE? Are you talking about GNOME? KDE? I've got X11 and a slew of window managers and other X11 apps installed and running on OS X, using Fink [sourceforge.net]. I would highly recommend that you get used to OS X's Aqua interface which is quite intuitive and powerful.

      • YHBT. YHL. HAND.

        Anyway, his point about laptop mouse buttons is perfectly correct: Apple will not let you have an internal trackpad with two buttons. He said nothing about peripheral mice.

        However, dual button trackpads require two hands to use comfortably, at which point modifier keys are superior anyway. Requiring two separate skus for single and dual button laptops would be retail suicide. If you're doing intensive mouse work on a laptop, and you need 2+ buttons, no currently offered trackpad will fill your needs. A two button trackpad is a doily on a warthog.

        His point about laptop ADB keyboards is also correct. The laptop in my 600 mHz iBook has an ADB keyboard, which poses several limitations that he describes accurately.

        He also surmises that this is because of "religious reasons," which is braindead. There is no apple-faithful desire for adb keyboards. It's surely a cost issue.

        His point about Unix look-and-feel is particularly braindead, though. You *can* have the Unix look-and-feel. X11 on MacOS X is free and easy.

        His implication that these changes would enable them to dominate the massive "Unix/DSP/Embedded/Engineering" market are absurd. The internal adb & 1 button trackpad have *nothing* to do with that market. They need mice for their work anyway. The X11 issue is dealt with. That particular market is not that special. They are already making huge strides there.

        Whatever. Now I've been trolled too.
    • Why does this anonymous post remind me of the *BSD is dying troll? Maybe it's all the random boldface and the only tangentially relevant whines, but I really think this would be a much stronger post with a gratuitous reference to Kreskin, or even better, some ominous predictions of imminent demise on the order of "Red ink flows like a river of blood"....

  • Server stuff (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Mr. Protocol ( 73424 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @04:13AM (#4372253)
    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?

  • Server Stuff, part 2 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Mr. Protocol ( 73424 ) on Wednesday October 02, 2002 @04:17AM (#4372266)
    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?
    • HFS+ isn't closed. There is plenty of documentation on it.
    • 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?

      You can format your drives to UFS for use with OS X if you want. But OS X performs much better with HFS+ than UFS.

      HFS has been around a long time too.

      • I don't doubt Mac OS X performs better with HFS+. The questions are: 1) Why? and 2) Is this because HFS+ is better than UFS, or because the Mac OS X implementation of UFS is suboptimal?
        • I don't doubt Mac OS X performs better with HFS+. The questions are: 1) Why? and 2) Is this because HFS+ is better than UFS, or because the Mac OS X implementation of UFS is suboptimal?

          I'd think OS X works better with HFS+ because it's optimized to work with HFS+

          I've read that HFS+ is more "modern" than UFS (aka BSD Fast File System), which was more important when hard drives were small and slow.

          Certain parts of OS X wont run on UFS (such as some Carbon apps), and except for case sensitivity, I'm not sure why one would need to use UFS over HFS+ on an OS X system.

          • I'd think OS X works better with HFS+ because it's optimized to work with HFS+.


            If that's true, I wonder why? Why change FreeBSD to work better with HFS+?

            I've read that HFS+ is more "modern" than UFS (aka BSD Fast File System), which was more important when hard drives were small and slow.


            Now, that's the kicker. Is it true? The one piece of hard evidence I have says that it isn't: HFS+ needs to be linearized periodically for best performance, via Speed Disk or something similar. UFS/FFS doesn't, because it spreads inodes and block allocations evenly over the disk, and clusters things so that files in a directory are preferentially localized. HFS+ has a catalog B-tree, and unless that's split up and spread over the disk, it means that the disk will continuously seek as it looks up files and then accesses their content. No matter how fast disks are now, that has to be bad.

            It's this sort of thing I'd like to hear Jordan's comments on.
  • The current OS X offering is more than a little schizophrenic. To wit, life in the Terminal app is ignorant of a whole bunch of stuff that's Apple-specific. If you tar up a bunch of files and untar them elsewhere, or even copy them, you can kiss the resource forks goodbye. The BSD side of the house doesn't even know that resource forks exist. And this is only one of the areas where Apple's worldview and BSD's worldview collide.

    What about this? Are we going to see a system with a unified vision of life, both via Aqua and the shell?
    • The sort of resource forks OS 9 used are depreciated.

      These days it is stored in the data fork. With most apps (that make good use of bundles) you have resources as separate files within the application bundle.

      For Carbon apps that don't use bundles, you are supposed to put the resources inside of the data fork.
    • This would appear to be moot as:

      1) Resource forks are deprecated

      2) I just did the following:

      # tar cf Applications.tar Applications/
      # rm -Rf Applications
      # tar xvf Applications.tar

      And all of my applications still work...

      Justin Dubs
  • It can be argued that Aqua's window system is a great deal more advanced than X. Heck, Rob Scheifler would probably agree with this. It's got a much more modern imaging model, is much more powerful, has a more unified architecture, and doesn't have 82 layers of cruft to fight through.

    Only problem is, it's not network-aware. You wanna run a window on a foreign system, you either install X, and give up on remoting Aqua services entirely, or use Macintosh Manager, which does god-knows-what.

    Sun dumped SunView 1 pretty damn quick when it became evident how mind-bogglingly useful X was in comparison. Can you comment on when we might see Aqua take the same step? Is it desirable?
  • ...I was still doing the magazine column, so you could tell me in private that you weren't going to answer the more embarrassing questions? :-)

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