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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Apple

Darwin 6.0.2 for x86 Released 584

Posted by pudge from the i-guess-people-do-still-use-x86 dept.
Jos Louis writes "Apple has released the x86 version 6.0.2 of Darwin, the FreeBSD-based core of Mac OS X. You can download the bootable ISO on Apple's site."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Darwin 6.0.2 for x86 Released More

Darwin 6.0.2 for x86 Released

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  • Not a troll (Score:5, Insightful)

    by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:23PM (#4551479)
    Could anybody give me a rundown of why you'd want to run this on your PC over say RedHat 8, which is also available for free, and under the GPL to boot?

    Also, what is the hardware support like?

    • Re:Not a troll (Score:4, Funny)

      by makisupa ( 118663 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:27PM (#4551505) Homepage
      Two words, one hyphenated:

      Multi-boot fetishists.

    • Re:Not a troll (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:32PM (#4551558)
      If you want to test server apps for MacOS X you develop but don't have a Mac, it's a good option.

      • Re:Not a troll (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:57PM (#4551770)

        If you want to test server apps for MacOS X...
        ...you get a mac.

        Seriously tho; if you're writing software for the mac, don't *assume* it will work on a mac if you did all your designing, testing, updating on a DIFFERENT ARCHITECHTURE! (sorry for screaming)

    • Unhelpful answer. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:32PM (#4551559)
      Run it if you like BSD and microkernels.

      Some people like the technical approach; some people like it because it's "fun" to play with/develop what will be the basis for a true consumer product; some people like it for the same reasons others prefer penguins over platypi.

      Myself, I'd rather run *BSD (in Free/Net/Open forms) over RH8 for a number of reasons- a few technical, a few based on rational-self-interest (the BSD tools and system layouts seem more 'intuitive' - always a dirty word - to interact with vs. some of the GNU-scene counterparts, but that's just personal preference), and some political.

      I couldn't say how good it actually is, because I've been prejudiced against it by hearsay (QNX6 gets love from me, if I want to enjoy a microkernel OS), but that's why someone'd want it.

    • Re:Not a troll (Score:3, Insightful)

      by bogie ( 31020 )
      You wouldn't. When I asked this question before the answer I got was this is just Apple "Giving back" what they could.

      I guess it's better than nothing, but I'd prefer they give back some of the interesting stuff, but that's never gonna happen.

      • Re:Not a troll (Score:5, Informative)

        by Arkham ( 10779 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:44PM (#4551667)
        I guess it's better than nothing, but I'd prefer they give back some of the interesting stuff, but that's never gonna happen.


        What about Darwin Streaming Server [apple.com] and Rendezvous [apple.com]? What about OpenPlay [apple.com] and OpenDirectory [apple.com]? Apple is releasing lots of neat projects as open-source. This just doesn't happen to be one of them.


        Darwin is great for OSX developers because it lets you look into the source of OSX and see how it works. It's not particularly useful as an x86 platform

        • Re:Not a troll (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Jezza ( 39441 )
          Err... I'm guessing that to a lot of Unix guys - the kernel doesn't really matter a jot. Afterall we use the Unix calls and as long as it does what the man page says it should that's fine. So a lot of this is redundant.

          But there are a lot of reasons you might want to use Darwin over GNU/Linux. You can add X to it, and compile up lots of software, from three feet away who'd guess it wasn't Linux or some other form of BSD?

          If that's true (and I think it is) then why is this less useful than Linux?

    • Anyone actually use Darwin? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ryochiji ( 453715 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:35PM (#4551580) Homepage
      Just out of curiosity, is anyone actually using Darwin? If you do use Darwin, why do you use it?

      • Re:Anyone actually use Darwin? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Cowrad ( 571322 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:41PM (#4551641)
        I'm using it. The reasons I'm using it will get me modded down, though.

        Quite simply, I think Linux sucks, and I choose not to run it on my x86 boxes. Almost all of my x86s are FreeBSD machines, but FreeBSD gets pretty boring after a while. Set it up, it runs, you're done.

        So I play with Darwin now and again, just for the change of pace.

        I don't know if 'change of pace' is the kind of answer you're looking for, but that's mine.

      • Re:Anyone actually use Darwin? (Score:4, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:42PM (#4551651)
        I use it because my operating system, Mac OS X, runs on it.

    • changes (Score:3, Insightful)

      by boolean0 ( 448844 )
      well, you could see what they've done to BSD, the changes they've made, etc, it could be rather interesting..

      they'll also get open source people to work for them this way, advancing their own work on OS X.

    • Re:Not a troll (Score:4, Informative)

      by sczimme ( 603413 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:36PM (#4551592)

      Follow the link to the bootable ISO in the summary. On that page you will see a link to the installation notes; the notes contain information on supported hardware.

      It appears that only 440BX-based systems are supported; AMD and VIA systems are explicitly described as not supported.
    • > Could anybody give me a rundown of why you'd want to run this on your PC over say RedHat 8, which is also available for free, and under the GPL to boot?

      Hard as it is to believe, some people will run it because it is neither a linux kernel, nor under the GPL.

    • Darwin's hardware support is a joke (Score:4, Informative)

      by EvilAlien ( 133134 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:57PM (#4551769) Journal
      I don't think anyone in their right mind would consider Darwin to be a replacement for anything on x86, much less for a fully developed Linux alternative. As per the install notes [apple.com], Darwin's hardware support is a joke:
      Supported Hardware

      ------------------

      IDE:
      Only the PIIX4 IDE controllers have been found to work.
      Attached devices must be UDMA/33 compatible or better.

      Ethernet:
      Intel 8255x 10/100 ethernet controllers are supported.

      Video:
      You must have a VESA 2.0 compliant video card. Almost all modern graphics cards are VESA 2.0 compliant. However, emulators such as vmware do not have VESA 2.0 compliant emulated video cards.

      Successfully tested hardware:
      All 440BX motherboards tested have worked with their internal IDE controllers.
      IBM ThinkPad A21m (with onboard Intel ethernet)

      Known to not be supported:
      All AMD and VIA based systems.
      It gets worse... release notes [apple.com] indicate that IDE drives may not work. Why do they even bother? It would really be nice to see effort put into the x86 version, with at least a hint that we might see Mac OS X on x86. Apple is still missing the obvious way to gain market share, and it is really sad.

      News like this helps erode any sympathy I have for Apple as it randomly flails around, trying to compete with Microsoft on the desktop market. I don't see how this is going to help Apple wedge itself into a niche as a real server platform, rumored journalling filesystem [macrumors.com] or not.

    • Re:Not a troll (Score:4, Insightful)

      by binarybits ( 11068 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @06:52PM (#4552137) Homepage
      For your average x86 Linux/BSD geek? You wouldn't.

      Darwin for x86 is Apple sanity check, to make sure they're writing portable code. If you don't work for Apple, don't hack the Darwin kernel, and don't enjoy playing with new operating systems recreationally, there's no reason you'd ever run Darwin/x86. For that matter, the same is more or less true of PowerPC Darwin. It's clearly not a good production system for most tasks, and is years away from being as mature as the mainstream BSD or Linux distros. Honestly, it probably never will be, unless Apple starts selling Mac OS X for PowerPC and pours a lot of resources into it.

      On the other hand, there are some people who for whatever reason want to play with Darwin/x86, and so Apple's making it available. There are some people who are just fanatical about NeXT products, Apple products, Mach kernels, or whatever. And Apple's happy to accomodate them, on he off-chance that they might produce something of value to Apple down the road. Releasing this also proves that it exists, which proves that Apple has options. That's good for Apple from a PR standpoint and puts some pressure on Motorola to ratchet up performance.

      Hardware support sucks. Supporting a lot of hardware isn't really the point. The point is simply to produce a version of Mac OS X that runs on stock PC hardware. If Apple ever decided to port OS X to the PC platform, they'd probably be building their own boxes, so support other companies' hardware isn't a bit priority.

    • Re:Not a troll (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 )
      There can be a bunch of reasons why you may want Darwin over RedHat 8. Lets say your are switching to a Mac Shop but you still have PCs. It would cut down the training if they all used simular OS and the administrators are use to the Newaunces of OSX. Software developers who are making server software before they port it to a mac. Is an afordable alternative (sure they may be some problems switching to PC from Mac with the final port but it will reduce the time)
      General knowlege, Some people want to learn new OSes see how they work and get the advantage and disatantage of different OS.
      Security, by using a less popular OS there are less people trying to break into your system.
      There is also the off chance that there will be a piece of software available for Darwin and not for Linux.
      A Pointy Hair Boss likes using products with the product name Apple behind its name.
      Source Code evaluation. How did OS X (No Pun attented) solve this problem compared to OS Y.

      Will Darwin of X86 be as comman as linux and be used to be the next Windows Killer. Probably not. But it is good to have knowlege of different systems so you can adapt to differnt changes in the future.

  • No VMWare (Score:5, Informative)

    by glenstar ( 569572 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:24PM (#4551481)
    It would be nice if I could install Darwin (in my case, GNU Darwin) under VMWare. I attempted four or five times before finally reading the release notes (D'oh), which explicitely states it would under no circumstances install under VMWare.

    • Re:No VMWare (Score:2, Informative)

      by jhunsake ( 81920 )
      That's because it only supports the hardware listed in this post [slashdot.org], which VMWare doesn't emulate.

  • Where's the source? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:25PM (#4551491)

    There is no source. The source remains unreleased because the source does not exist. The real story is the part that Apple is not telling us: The fact that they have evolved an organic "force" capable of developing a kernel directly, as executable machine code, without human intervention. The implications are terrifying and profound.

    Why do you think they called it.... DARWIN?!

    • Re:Where's the source? (Score:4, Funny)

      by mr_z_beeblebrox ( 591077 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:34PM (#4551572) Journal
      The real story is the part that Apple is not telling us: The fact that they have evolved an organic "force" capable of developing a kernel directly, as executable machine code, without human intervention.

      The part you were unaware of, is that MS is miles ahead of them as Outlook 2002 can automatically run organic machine code without human intervention.

      • Re:Where's the source? (Score:5, Informative)

        by tswinzig ( 210999 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:43PM (#4551661) Journal
        The part you were unaware of, is that MS is miles ahead of them as Outlook 2002 can automatically run organic machine code without human intervention.

        The irony here is that you are making fun of the first version of a Microsoft email program that does NOT give users access to executable attachments, and does NOT let an outside program use it to send email without approval gained from a popup window.

        • Re:Where's the source? (Score:3, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward
          The irony here is that you are making fun of the first version of a Microsoft email program that does NOT give users access to executable attachments, and does NOT let an outside program use it to send email without approval gained from a popup window.

          But it does eat babies.

          Really! You can test this yourself. If you or someone you know has a computer with Outlook 2002 installed, leave it on overnight, and watch. At some point between midnight and 2 AM (what exactly triggers this feature is as of yet unknown, although the time of activation seems to oscillate within its two-hour window with the phase of the moon) Outlook 2002 will climb out of the computer, skitter to a window, climb outside, and hunt the streets until it finds a house containing a baby, at which point it will enter, consume the baby bloodily, and return to your computer. If during the entrance or exit of either your or the victim's house it encounters a locked window, it will shatter the glass and continue.

          This behavior has been independently confirmed numerous times since the release of Outlook 2002, and yet so far Microsoft has declined to comment on it. I suggest you go read the rather long bugtraq thread on the subject.

      • Re:Where's the source? (Score:5, Funny)

        by Ilan Volow ( 539597 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:56PM (#4551759) Homepage
        That's no AI. That's Clippy. He's been running in spite of human intervention for years.

    • Re:Where's the source? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      There is source, you just have to use cvs to get it, or download all the components separately via the html frontend somewhere on the Darwin pages @ apple.

    • I submitted the above anonymously... (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      ...because it's just not all that funny. Why the hell are you people modding it up?! Get a grip!

  • It's getting closer (Score:2, Interesting)

    by boy_afraid ( 234774 )
    It been rumored that Apple would bring OS X to the x86 and has a working version in secrecy under penalty of death to whomsoever relveals it. Apple knows that they have something that the Linux/Windows geeks really want, just like we want the iPod to work under Windows.

    Steve Jobs is not smoking crack, just weed.

    • Re:It's getting closer (Score:2, Informative)

      by derch ( 184205 )
      and what crack are you smoking? People had hacked the iPod to work with Windows shortly after it's release. To boot, Apple now sells a Windows version [com.com].

      PS - Even if Apple moved OS X to the x86 family, you'd still have to buy an Apple PC.

  • Supported Hardware (Score:5, Informative)

    by Darth_Burrito ( 227272 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:28PM (#4551513)
    Read this first:
    http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/d arwin/6. 0/install.x86.txt

    Supported Hardware
    ------------------

    IDE:
    Only the PIIX4 IDE controllers have been found to work.
    Attached devices must be UDMA/33 compatible or better.
    Ethernet:
    Intel 8255x 10/100 ethernet controllers are supported.
    Video:
    You must have a VESA 2.0 compliant video card. Almost all
    modern graphics cards are VESA 2.0 compliant. However, emulators
    such as vmware do not have VESA 2.0 compliant emulated video cards.
    Successfully tested hardware:
    All 440BX motherboards tested have worked with their internal
    IDE controllers.
    IBM ThinkPad A21m (with onboard Intel ethernet)
    Known to not be supported:
    All AMD and VIA based systems.
    • Odd. That's exactly the hardware in my (home) Red Hat server at the moment. Maybe I'll actually take a look at it tonight.

  • oh well.. (Score:2, Informative)

    by bm_luethke ( 253362 )
    Known to not be supported: All AMD and VIA based systems.

    There goes me trying it. seems to have a fairly small set of hardware it runs on.

  • Serious question... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:28PM (#4551515)
    Does anyone actually use Darwin on x86? I know it's good that Apple have kept open the core of their OS (although it'd be a good step to see more Aqua code), but surely if you want a PC-based UNIX you'd go for some BSD flavour or Linux in the first place.

    Only reason I can see for running Darwin is for Mac hackers who want to enhance the OS -- but that poses another question: does Apple accept patches?

    This is a serious question -- what are the benefits of Darwin being open?

    • Darwin is BSD (Score:2, Insightful)

      by yerricde ( 125198 )

      but surely if you want a PC-based UNIX you'd go for some BSD flavour

      Darwin is a BSD flavour. A long time ago, the BSD source forked; on one side, we have FreeBSD and Darwin, and on the other, NetBSD and OpenBSD.

      (I could be wrong; corrections are appreciated.)

    • Depending on the license, the benefit might be that one could fork and make their own version of darwin, allowing mac (and x86 Darwing users) an instance of choice. ...and choice is a beautiful thing.

    • Re:Serious question... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Raster Burn ( 213891 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:40PM (#4551631)
      They say on their website that they maintain an x86 port just to ensure that their code is relatively portable - not really for our benefit.

      • They do it to maintain the balance of power (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Ilan Volow ( 539597 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @06:05PM (#4551816) Homepage
        The name of the game is deterrance. It's like cold war.

        • Apple works on a partial x86 port of OS X (Darwin x86). Not that they are ever going to deploy a full x86 OS X, but they want to let microsoft know they can do so at any moment.
        • Microsoft keeps "re-evaluating" whether they should be releasing Mac versions of Office. Not that they are ever going to cancel Office for Macintosh, but they want to let Apple know they can do so at any moment.

        • Re:They do it to maintain the balance of power (Score:4, Insightful)

          by mindstrm ( 20013 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @06:39PM (#4552041)
          Apple works on a partial x86 port of OS X (Darwin x86). Not that they are ever going to deploy a full x86 OS X, but they want to let microsoft know they can do so at any moment.

          They very well may release it; if intel processors get far enough ahead, apple will most likely make a new mac based on an intel processor. It won't be a version for the common PC, but it will be a box with an intel chip in it.

    • Re:Serious question... (serious results?) (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tyler_larson ( 558763 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @07:09PM (#4552246) Homepage
      Only reason I can see for running Darwin is for Mac hackers who want to enhance the OS -- but that poses another question: does Apple accept patches?

      This is a serious question -- what are the benefits of Darwin being open?

      A little research [apple.com] reveals that Apple does in fact accepts patches and hopes to see real real help and real results from the open source community with their kernel.

      So the real question about their open-source philosophy is, Does it actually work? In other words, are they actually seeing results, and are we really trying to contribute.

      I know for a fact that I don't ever plan to contribute to Apple's open-source projects because:

      • Darwin is relatively useless on x86
      • I can't afford to waste that much money to buy a mac just to play with it. I can build a quality x86 box for just a few hundred bones.
      • All of the fun Apple projects (Aqua et. al.) that I would be interested in tweaking are closed-source.
      • There's already another high-quality open-source UNIX-compatible kernel that's much more widely supported and understood. If I want to do any hacking, I do it with Linux.

      I realize that Apple has reasons for not opening their other projects, and I don't expect them to change their minds any time soon. But how much help can they really expect when they don't give us any incentive to work with them?

      Did Apple decide to take this road because "open source" was just one of those buzzwords that translated to "free labor" in the minds of management? Do they really have any intention of listening to what hackers want, or do they just expect us to work on anything that calls itself "open source"?

      • All of the fun Apple projects (Aqua et. al.) that I would be interested in tweaking are closed-source.

        Hmmm. Perhaps Apple is keeping all these things closed source so you CAN'T indulge your interest in "tweaking." Perhaps these elements are fundamental enough to Apple's core goal for OS X that they don't want to be distracted by hundreds of amateurs submitting what they think are improvements. Instead, these tweakers will proliferate yet more useless "skins" for Linux desktop environments.

        The kind of thing I'm sure Linux hackers would love to add: X window "compatible" cut and paste behavior, various redundant widgets with unpolished appearance and behavior, font rendering "optimizations" that gain 10% in throughput while adding 100% in butt-ugliness, etc. Thank god you can't add those to Aqua.

  • GCC (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 00_NOP ( 559413 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:29PM (#4551521) Homepage
    I assume Apple don't build their production software with GCC, or do they?

    Anybody care to comment - as best they can - on the difference between the GCC compiled code and code compiled with whatever tools Apple use?

    • Re:GCC (Score:5, Informative)

      by chriswaco ( 37809 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:34PM (#4551569)
      Apple uses gcc. I think they moved to gcc 3.x for the PowerPC builds. I don't know what version they are using for Intel builds.

      There are probably some projects at Apple that use CodeWarrior or even MPW, but in general MacOS X is built using gcc.

      • Re:GCC (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Jezza ( 39441 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @06:18PM (#4551923)
        It seems (from a developer's point of view) that they use GCC for Darwin and Cocoa and CodeWarrior for Carbon.

        This makes sense - Mac developers have used CodeWarrior on "classic Mac OS" for quite some time.

        NeXT always used GCC (in fact I think they helped to add Objective-C to GCC in the first place).

        It's a safe bet they use GCC for the Intel builds too - that's how you get portability for Kernels (that's how Linux does it too).

        It's always seemed to me that GCC was the unsung hero of open source, and Linux in particular.

    • Re:GCC (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The developers tools that ship with OS X do use GCC, and it is my understanding that Apple developers use these tools for their own software.

      The dev tools that ship with OS X are excellent, and I would be very surprised if Apple put all that effort into making such kick-ass tools only to use something else internally.

    • Anybody care to comment - as best they can - on the difference between the GCC compiled code and code compiled with whatever tools Apple use?

      GCC is nearly ansi standard, I am sure that whatever they use for C it also is nearly ansi standard. Additionally, (correct me if I am wrong) but I do not believe it matters what you compile on. What will matter later on is what libraries are installed and that is a user/administrative choice. That is why you can get a Linux environment for your windows PC from Red Hat.

  • Maybe a major problem? (Score:2, Informative)

    by jimson ( 516491 )
    From the release notes:
    * IDE drives may not work on x86. Try it, if it doesn't work, it's a known problem.
    That seems like a pretty major problem to me.....

  • I'm confused... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dirtside ( 91468 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:31PM (#4551549) Journal
    Okay, every time there's an OS X story on Slashdot, someone asks when they'll be able to use it on x86 hardware, and someone else responds and says, "Never!"

    So here we have "the x86 version 6.0.2 of Darwin, the FreeBSD-based core of Mac OS X". Huh? Is it just the user interface part of OS X that there's no x86 version of? And exactly how much stuff does this "FreeBSD-based core" contain? Is it just a kernel, filesystem, and some basic utilities, or what?

    • Re:I'm confused... (Score:5, Informative)

      by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:39PM (#4551629)
      So here we have "the x86 version 6.0.2 of Darwin, the FreeBSD-based core of Mac OS X". Huh? Is it just the user interface part of OS X that there's no x86 version of? And exactly how much stuff does this "FreeBSD-based core" contain? Is it just a kernel, filesystem, and some basic utilities, or what?

      Darwin itself is just the kernel, some drivers, some tools (mostly bsd and gnu) and a few bits and bobs like NetInfo. Large parts aren't actually BSD however, like the microkernelness, and they have their own IO APIs (IOKit).

      MacOS X is then everything else - not just Aqua as some suggest, but Quartz, Aqua, all the utilities/programs (finder, mac ui, control center), the iApps, Cocoa, Carbon etc. In fact, virtually everything that you need to have a useful OS.

      From what I've seen so far, it seems that Darwin/x86 is at about the same level that Linux was in terms of features/hardware support in 1993.

      • MacOS X is then everything else - not just Aqua as some suggest, but Quartz, Aqua, all the utilities/programs (finder, mac ui, control center), the iApps, Cocoa, Carbon etc. In fact, virtually everything that you need to have a useful OS.

        Linux lacks Quartz, Aqua the Finder, iApps, Cocoa, Carbon, etc. Both Darwin and Linux can run all the expected command-line Unix apps (emacs, apache, Perl, GNU utils, etc.) as well as X11 and the assorted window managers and GUI toolkits. So what is this quote saying? Is it saying that Linux lacks "virtually everything that you need to have a useful OS"?

    • Re:I'm confused... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by tswinzig ( 210999 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:45PM (#4551683) Journal
      Okay, every time there's an OS X story on Slashdot, someone asks when they'll be able to use it on x86 hardware, and someone else responds and says, "Never!"

      And every time there's an article on slashdot telling of the latest Darwin release, someone posts a question very similar to yours:

      So here we have "the x86 version 6.0.2 of Darwin, the FreeBSD-based core of Mac OS X". Huh? Is it just the user interface part of OS X that there's no x86 version of? And exactly how much stuff does this "FreeBSD-based core" contain? Is it just a kernel, filesystem, and some basic utilities, or what?

      It's basically the kernel. Nothing on the level of the user-friendly OS X.

  • If I can get this to work... (Score:5, Funny)

    by rickthewizkid ( 536429 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:36PM (#4551587)
    ... do I get a "Darwin Award?"

    Heaven knows I'll be spending enough time hacking on this that I won't have *time* for kids... :)

    Seriously, kudos to Apple for releasing this... it was a good treat for the day my DSL came back to life!

    RickTheWizKid

  • *not* FreeBSD based dammit (Score:5, Informative)

    by Leimy ( 6717 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:36PM (#4551589)
    Its XNU... mach+a bsd personality in the same address space with some FreeBSD userland tools.
  • 15 minutes and the reg server is spouting 500 server errors...Are they running X-servs?? j/k

  • Open Source for Apple (Score:4, Interesting)

    by swagr ( 244747 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @05:39PM (#4551616) Homepage
    Basically this just means that developers who write console applications, servers, etc can now port and test with ease.

    This is good for Apple because they get more for free.

  • What exactly do you get? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mcraw ( 571702 )

    If I were to install this on my machine, what exactly would I get?

    Would it be just a basic BSD-like OS? Would any OS X features be there?

    In short, how much of a running Mac OS X install is OS X and how much is Darwin?

  • Byte compares linux and ox s performance (Score:5, Informative)

    by mojorisin67_71 ( 238883 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @06:10PM (#4551854)
    Byte released a comparision of linux and OS X at here [byte.com]

  • For the freaking 10,000th time... (Score:5, Informative)

    by maggard ( 5579 ) <michael@michaelmaggard.com> on Monday October 28, 2002 @06:12PM (#4551877) Homepage Journal
    Darwin is not MacOS X.

    It is much of the core of MaxcOS X but it lacks many of MacOS X's layers and services like Carbon, Cocoa, Quartz, and of course Aqua.

    If you don't know what those mean don't post the same damn lame question to /. asking for these to ONCE AGAIN be explained. There's a search function: Goddamn use it as the topic has been discussed NUMEROUS times on /.

    Or show some minimal level of initiative and look it up for yourself (hint: World Wide Web) where it's all well detailed in ways even the lamest "explain-this-to-me" poster would get in a dozen places online.

    Next, yes, there is an x86 port of MacOS X inside Apple. Will it ever see the light of day? Not likely (sorry PC fanboys).

    Does this mean Apple plans to use MacOS X'86?

    Yes, they use it every day to make sure that MacOS X remains true to the portability of it's predecessor Openstep (which was on 5 platforms.) Undoubtedly Apple figures if MacOS X can be kept running on the very different PPC & x86 platforms then they're good for about anything.

    Why x86 over some other processor? First off Openstep (or whatever you want to call/capitalize it) was updated by Apple as part of their aborted "Rhapsody" strategy to both PPC & x86 so it was little effort to keep it going to MacOS X. Furthermore this helps keep Apple from getting caught in any PPC-isms in the future. Cross-porting helps show up any problems early, keeps everyone honest, provides valuable insight into many problems.

    What good is Darwin? Well, it does run a lot of code, including things like Apple's free streaming media server. It gives MacOS X developers a look into the heart of MacOS X. That it comes out for x86 just lets that many more folks play with it.

    Finally, to respond to the next half-dozen whinges that come up every time:

    • Yes Darwin is Open Source.
    • No Apple isn't going to give away the rest of MacOS X. As much as many folks go gimme-gimme-gimme-for-free Apple's management has fiduciary responsibility to keep the company profitable; giving away MacOS X in its entirety will not further that goal.
    • No QuickTime does not lockout Linux or any other users. QuickTime is a file-format and some libraries, not a codec (clue phone ringing!) Yes Apple licensed a codec, you want access to it find someone willing to pony up the cash like Apple did. That other folks use that codec is lovely but there's no gun to their head preventing them from using any of the other codecs.
    • No Apple would not do well selling or giving away MacOS X'86. If you think you've got some novel bit of reasoning that makes this a good strategy for Apple go pitch it to their board, don't bleat about it on /. again where nobody well-informed is buying it.
    • Is Darwin "better" then XYZ? Who knows, depends entirely on for what to whom with which criteria.
    • Do PPC/Mach/micro-kernels/aesthetics/etc matter? Well as Apple seems to be one of the few PC vendors doing well and MacOS X is now the best-selling Unix then yeah, apparently Apple is doing something right.
    • Last, but not least, love 'em or hate 'em Apple makes waves and does interesting things. None of the other vendors constantly do as interesting things or generate so much controversy, gotta love 'em for that.

    • "Yes Apple licensed a codec, you want access to it find someone willing to pony up the cash like Apple did."

      My understanding (and so this is 2nd hand, but I don't see you doing any better) is that when you call Apple they say "Ask Sorenson" and when you call Sorenson they say "Ask Apple".

      Yes, they can /legally/ give everyone the run around like this, but I don't think it's /ethical/ for them to do so. It may even be bad business.

      Worse, experience suggests that if a better alternative is developed and made free Apple AND Sorenson will do everything in their power to discourage their users from accessing this improved technology.

      The duplicability versus scale problem hits big for this kind of stuff. Everyone hiring one or two academics, making them sign NDAs and keeping them apart is not the most effective way of delivering improved compression to real users. That's why we have a dozen competing "next generation" streaming audio codecs, none of which are universally available. [It would be nice to think that MS & Apple will see sense and ship Vorbis but don't count on it]

      This /is/ rocket science and if Apple were serious about delivering for media people they'd put their codec money together with other people's and have the technology developed in the open. They can differentiate elsewhere without wasting all these resources on duplicated effort.

  • Something only Apple could do? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by CathedralRulz ( 566696 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @06:16PM (#4551907)
    I wonder if the reason that Apple is willing to make it's core OS open source is because, as long as software developed with it is running on a Mac (that's the idea), and they are the only folks selling Macs, the more the merrier.

    Apple started doing this in 1999 at great expense and effort. In this time, has it paid off? I really don't know, so please enlighten me if it has or hasn't.

  • It's Obvious to me... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by maccroz ( 126399 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @06:25PM (#4551964)
    Okay...maybe this has already been posted and I missed it, or maybe I'm way off...but here's my take on the situation.

    The reason Apple is releasing Darwin for x86 is because Motorola has very little incentive to keep up in the processor wars. Granted, the PowerPC chipset is fantastic, it's just not a big player anymore as Motorola has better things to do than to cater to Apple's whims.

    Just as they released an infantile Darwin for PowerPC, they are releasing it now for x86 so that people can port their drivers to Darwin. Once Apple has enough hardware support, they are one step closer to porting Aqua and all the higher layers of MacOS X towards the x86 architechture and having a way of escaping the sluggish Motorola chips.

    MacOS X is a fantastic operating system and unfortunately it is far from living to its potential due to inferior and expensive chips from one provider. This is one step in the direction that people have been encouraging apple to make for the past 15 years. We all know that Apple is slow to respond, they like to take their time and make sure it is the right decision before they do anything drastic.

    Imagine how much cheaper an x86 Mac would be and how much of a heavyweight they would finally be if MacOS X became an option to the other 95% of the computing population. I believe that this is just Apple keeping all their options open with a miniscule investment on their part.

    I'd still like to see two buttons on the iBook, or heaven for bid they put a wheel on their stupid buttonless mouse. I love Apple, but sometimes they just have their thumbs up their asses. Hopefully this is a move in the right direction.

  • OS X to be on x86 in 2003, according to Giga (Score:4, Informative)

    by cweiblen ( 465407 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @06:26PM (#4551965) Homepage
    Giga predicts Apple will offer OS X on x86 next year:

    http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0210/28.intel. php [macworld.com]

  • NOT FreeBSD -based! (Score:5, Informative)

    by otuz ( 85014 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @06:50PM (#4552118) Homepage
    Darwin, the FreeBSD-based core of Mac OS X

    The core is NOT based on FreeBSD. The userland is a port of the FreeBSD userland, yes. It would not be based on Linux, if the default userland were GNU-utils.
    The core of Darwin/MacOS 10 is a Darwin (or NeXT Step) -based kernel/"core" running on Mach-nanokernel.. more alike GNU/HURD than FreeBSD (or Linux).

    • Re:NOT FreeBSD -based! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by karlm ( 158591 )
      Good post, you just missed one small point: Mach is a microkernel. It's a big dirty-old man of a microkernel at that. Mach is a big reason GNU/HURD isn't performing as well as hoped. OS X gets reasonable performance out of Mach by using a monolithic server (as opposed to HURD's more modular multiserver approach) and running the server in the same address space as Mach itself (thus it's not a Machsever in the strictst sense).

      I've run some fast microkernel/nanokernel OSsses on my x86 machine (BeOS, QNX, L4Linux) that all use much lighter-weight kernels and servers that run in user space. L4 and the QNX kernel each weigh in at about 1/10th the size of my maximally pruned Linux 2.4.18 kernel (everything compiled as modules, except IDE and ext2 support). Mach itself without the BSD personality probably is slightly bigger than my Linux kernel. I nuked my GNU/HURD partition last weekend, so I can't tell you for sure. L4-Hazelnut and the QNX kernel each have about 32k of compiled assembly and 32k of C++ code. Hopefully OS X will eventually migrate to a nanokernel and/or runing multiservers in userspace.

      BTW - I wouldn't recomend L4Linux, at least a year agoit was less stable than Mac System 7. I think it was due to a poor job of making linux into a monoserver, as the debugging counters would keep rolling in the corner of my screen and there were no L4 panics/ Maybe in a couple of years L4-HURD or L4-Linux will be up to par. There are some reeally nice things going on in that area of research.

  • Darwin is no longer a micro-kernel (Score:5, Informative)

    by AIXadmin ( 10544 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @06:57PM (#4552170) Homepage
    Darwin is no longer a true micro-kernel. Maybe people will stop bitching. Apple has taken the best of both worlds and combined them.

    Read Apple's Docs on there developer site:
    "The core of any operating system is its kernel. The Mac OS X kernel is also known as XNU. Though Mac OS X shares much of its underlying architecture with BSD, the kernel is one area where they differ significantly. XNU is based on the Mach microkernel design, but it also incorporates BSD features. It is not technically a microkernel implementation, but still has many of the benefits of a microkernel.
    Why is it designed like this? Pure Mach allows you to run an operating system as a separate process on the system that allows for flexibility, but can also slow things down because of the translation between Mach and the layers above it. With Mac OS X, since the desired behavior of the operating system is known, BSD functionality has been incorporated in the kernel alongside Mach. The result is that the kernel combines the strengths of Mach with the strengths of BSD.

    http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Darwi n/ PortingUNIX/additionalfeatures/The_Kernel.html

  • PC to Mac (Score:3, Funny)

    by u19925 ( 613350 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @06:59PM (#4552190)
    I downloaded Darwin and loaded on my computer. Upon reboot, it evolved into Mac.

  • Darwin (Score:4, Funny)

    by Zen Programmer ( 518532 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @07:24PM (#4552333)
    Only Apple would have the balls/ingenuity/vanity to name their product Darwin.

    In other news, Windows has released a competing OS codenamed 'God'.

  • An Intel CPU does NOT mean PC hardware! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by pauljlucas ( 529435 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @07:32PM (#4552383) Homepage Journal
    Hypothetically, if Apple were to switch to using Intel CPUs, i.e., x86s, that does not mean that you'd be able to install and run OS X on any old PC box.

    All it would mean would be that Apple would unplug the PowerPC CPU from the motherboard and plug in an Intel CPU (plus whatever other motherboard tweaks were necessary to make this actually work: the pin-outs are different, for example). The G4 towers, iMacs, PowerBooks, and iBooks would all look exactly the same. You'd still be buying Apple machines.

    Apple is in the business of selling hardware: their hardware. Plus, you can bet that Steve would never let OS X run on anything as aesthetically unpleasing as a typical PC box.

  • Rhapsody X86? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mbourgon ( 186257 ) on Monday October 28, 2002 @08:59PM (#4552819) Homepage
    Time to go back a little in the Wayback machine. I have a set of Rhapsody CDs, which (as I understand it) was Darwin + Mac_goodness, basically NeXTStep + Mac stuff. Now, I don't have the floppies for it, so I've never been able to test it. But, would anyone like to comment on how well it works, the state of Pre-Aqua on X86, etc, etc?

  • Why I think Apple releases Darwin/x86 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by PinkX ( 607183 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2002 @01:05AM (#4553770) Homepage

    There already is a huge base of x86 users around the globe, and inside it, an ever-growing base of GNU/Linux, *BSD and all sort of *NIX and opensource enthusiasts. That gives them a pretty good testbed for debugging the system, and making it more compatible.

    Backporting it to a completely different platform from what it was originally developed (FreeBSD/x86 -> Darwin/PPC -> Darwin/x86) is a pretty good sanity check in order to see they didn't break what was already there, gives them a good shot on portability (think byte order endianness) and gives them a nice try on moving from their current platform (Motorola PPC) to some future versions (IBM Power4). By making the base system more portable, it's just a matter of recompiling the upper layers (think GUI, APIs, etc.) to asure potential future compatibility.

    I don't think the Darwin/x86 release is due to enter the *nix market which is already dominated by the various *BSD flavors and GNU/Linux. Besides what I've previously said, it shows commitment from the Apple people to the OpenSource community.

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