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Apple closes down Darwin for Intel
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Severed Hand of Skywalker
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May 17, 2006, 11:54 AM
 
"Thanks to pirates, or rather the fear of them, the Intel edition of Apple's OS X is now a proprietary operating system."

http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index...ge=1&pagePos=8

Is there any way to measure how much we gained by having it open source?

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Eug Wanker
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May 17, 2006, 11:57 AM
 
"Thanks to pirates, or rather the fear of them, the Intel edition of Apple's OS X is now a proprietary operating system."
Translated:

"Now that Apple has used the open source community to help develop their OS for Intel Macs, Apple is shutting the door on them."
     
olePigeon
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May 17, 2006, 12:20 PM
 
This is old, old news and has been around on the mailing lists for a long time. All of Apple's open source projects are still running except for the kernel source. That's it.

Apple isn't shutting any doors. The parts about the OS that the developers care about are still open source under APSL and GPL. All those projects are still running and still available even though Apple is under no obligation to keep them running.

http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/

By the way, this could also mean that 10.5 or 10.6 might be moving to a new inhouse, custom built kernel instead of using Mach.
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Millennium
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May 17, 2006, 02:12 PM
 
Originally Posted by olePigeon
By the way, this could also mean that 10.5 or 10.6 might be moving to a new inhouse, custom built kernel instead of using Mach.
This has been rumored for some time. Supposedly, Avie Tevanian (who was one of the original authors of Mach) left because Apple decided they didn't want to use his baby anymore.
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adster
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May 17, 2006, 02:17 PM
 
Originally Posted by Millennium
This has been rumored for some time. Supposedly, Avie Tevanian (who was one of the original authors of Mach) left because Apple decided they didn't want to use his baby anymore.

Hmmm. Does this give any credence to Cringley's article that Apple might be dumping Mach?
     
Eug Wanker
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May 17, 2006, 02:19 PM
 
How different would a rumoured new kernel be? What would this mean for backwards compatibility for software?
     
Millennium
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May 17, 2006, 02:36 PM
 
Originally Posted by Eug Wanker
How different would a rumoured new kernel be?
Ideally, not very different at all. Software that doesn't talk directly to Mach shouldn't notice the difference. That's supposed to be one of the big advantages of the microkernel architecture. If Apple does decide to drop Mach, then they're probably dropping it for performance reasons, and so there should be a nice speed boost.
What would this mean for backwards compatibility for software?
This depends, in large part, on exactly what's changed. Ideally, anything which doesn't talk directly to Mach shouldn't be affected. However, there are a few classes of software which could be in trouble:

1) Device drivers. I don't know how much IOKit abstracts Mach out of things, but even if it completely abstracts Mach away there are probably some devices that talk directly to Mach anyway.
2) Anything using mach_inject would definitely fail at first. Some of it may never be able to be rewritten, depending on whether or not this new kernel implements equivalent functionality to what mach_inject used.
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Severed Hand of Skywalker  (op)
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May 17, 2006, 02:42 PM
 
Originally Posted by Eug Wanker
How different would a rumoured new kernel be? What would this mean for backwards compatibility for software?
So far everyone said it would be much faster.

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TETENAL
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May 17, 2006, 02:45 PM
 
I see no point in switching to a slower kernel.
     
olePigeon
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May 17, 2006, 02:50 PM
 
Originally Posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker
So far everyone said it would be much faster.
Maybe it's to address the threading issue, especially if they want to remain competitive in the server market.
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