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

[Bill Moran]

"Jonathan S. Billings" <billings at negate.org> wrote:

> 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.

I think the problem is that a microkernel is too much effort to develop,
debug, and maintain, and you really don't gain a lot by using one, unless
you're a developer.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com