[wplug-bsd] Fw: OT: Beastie makes a cameo appearance on apple.com.

[Jonathan S. Billings]

On Mon, 2004-06-28 at 17:23, Bill Moran wrote:
> I was pretty surprised by this.  Considering the large number of Mac users in
> the WPLUG community, I thought this might be of interest.
> 
> Unless I'm misunderstanding, Apple has forsaken the MACH kernel in favor
> of a new kernel based on FreeBSD 5.

No, this isn't the case.  Apple has the FreeBSD kernel sitting on top of
the Mach microkernel.  I believe previous versions of MacOS X used the
4.x kernel and libraries.  I remember seeing a nice graphic on Apple's
website, but I can't find it right now.  The Mach microkernel does most
of the hard work of talking to the hardware, and the BSD kernel provides
the system interface that everyone is familiar with.  This is quite like
how NeXTStep was built, and it was capable of running on top of all
sorts of hardware, including windows, because the microkernel was ported
to all those different platforms.  

It's funny, for a while, microkernels used to be all the rage.  You
don't hear about it very much anymore, not even from Apple.
-- 
Jonathan S. Billings <billings at negate.org>