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macOS Internals

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Re: macOS Internals

#131

Post by sgt »

astrange wrote: post #120
sgt wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am mostly fine with Marco but he introduces so much fluff and nonsense that I subconsciously avoid listening to ATP.

That seems to be in demand. They're sort of associated with relay.fm podcasts which I looked into and found that, while they're supposedly tech podcasts, they're actually just guys talking about everything that happened to them today. (Oddest case being one with CGPGrey, who I think is a famous youtuber? But you wouldn't learn a single thing about this from listening to it. Instead they talked about some kind of plan…

Again, I agree. But strangely not a lot of folks see it the same way.

Re: macOS Internals

#132

Post by saagarjha »

Maursault wrote: post #129
saagarjha wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're calling my comment strained, but somehow missed the fact that all of the things you mentioned are shipped by Apple and updated basically together? The comment mentions Sparkle as "patching up this gap" so it's very clear what they meant: third party applications. Nobody is asking for updates for "every application there is", but providing an API to update third-party apps. MacPorts, despite getting significant…

> You're calling my comment strained, but somehow missed the fact that all of the things you mentioned are shipped by Apple and updated basically together? Again, you're handwaving and intentionally failing to acknowledge that Safari and GarageBand and all the other applications are applications , like any other a team may develop and/or a user may use source to build, or download and run an installer, or drag and dr…

Your commenting style reminded me a lot of a discussion I had earlier, which went on far longer than I had expected it to for stupid semantic quibbles that didn't even end up panning out to be correct. Of course I decided to go look it up, and it's none other than you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34589999

Here is some unsolicited feedback: you are unpleasant to interact with. You reply to people in an incredibly smug and self-satisfied way, except you often say things that are wrong or at the very least significantly misunderstand context. When people mention this to you just dig deeper by doubling down and accusing people of intentional bad faith. To be honest your responses make me wonder if you are involved in distribution of macOS software, because your views seem to distanced from the request at the top of this thread, which is so familiar to every Mac developer that they would recognize it immediately, and yet your initial response was like you just went online and searched "macOS update software" and picked the first command line tool you found, without looking at whether it matched the need being expressed. When I told you this you seem to have fixed on the word "package manager" and decided to argue that softwareupdate is one rather than understanding that I literally do not care what you call it. I understand and accept that macOS's built in software updater can update some of the things you've mentioned, although I disagree on the details of how you've presented it, but you haven't for a moment stopped to think "why did Sparkle come up in the conversation at all? Perhaps I am missing something by not addressing it?" Instead you ended up focusing some sort of definition about how OS updates and security patches are some sort of "package manager", and decided to be condescending while you did so. Seriously, you don't get to call my point for a "system API" to be a strawman when it is responding to a need for a "core OS service".

I enjoy talking to people who know their stuff, and sometimes I will put up with jerks if I learn something new, even though I would rather that they weren't abrasive. I haven't learned anything from this conversation, and I am unsure you know what you're talking about let alone what we are talking about. The fact that you keep doing this is quite disappointing and honestly makes me not want to engage with you. I don't check usernames very often and might still do it by accident but if you keep this up and I suddenly stop responding to you it's probably because I realized who I was talking to and didn't want to respond anymore.

Re: macOS Internals

#133

Post by vaughan »

vernal wrote: post #92
vaughan wrote: post #4

History is such a great way to learn anything. It’s interesting - like a mystery revealed, but also provides the why - why things are the way they are. I was looking into accounting the other day, and you can go back to the first document that mentioned credit and debit and introduced modern accounting. There are so many topics like this that seem confusing and arbitrary but it all began extremely simply and pragmati…

What was that first accounting document?

For double-entry accounting, Luca Pacioli's Summa. The history of accounting is a bit more complex and unknown.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_de_arithmetica

Re: macOS Internals

#134

Post by vaughan »

raarts wrote: post #56
robertlagrant wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. This is why often reading a Wikipedia page is the worst way to learn something. The best way is to get a teacher to tell you the relevant history leading up to the thing, and it makes much more sense.

CS teacher here. This is my preferred way to teach stuff. Way easier to remember and understand knowledge if you know its origin story.

Do students respond well?

When I was in school, a lot of teachers did a little tidbit of history at the start of topics, but I never latched onto it and found it boring. It was only after my studies that I started to really love going back to the origin.

Re: macOS Internals

#135

Post by raarts »

vaughan wrote: post #134
raarts wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CS teacher here. This is my preferred way to teach stuff. Way easier to remember and understand knowledge if you know its origin story.

Do students respond well? When I was in school, a lot of teachers did a little tidbit of history at the start of topics, but I never latched onto it and found it boring. It was only after my studies that I started to really love going back to the origin.

Well, you can make almost any subject interesting if you do it right. In my experience it's mostly the teachers fault if students are bored.

That said, some students cannot be activated whatever your do. We're all people.

Re: macOS Internals

#136

Post by wkat4242 »

I still have Amit Singh's huge book on my shelf here. Completely outdated now, of course. But it was always quite interesting.

It's nice to see someone else has taken on the task of bringing that kind of insight into the modern age. Because Apple certainly won't.

Re: macOS Internals

#137

Post by wkat4242 »

DavidPiper wrote: post #6
krackers wrote: post #3

If you want to go even deeper there's the book series by Jonathan Levin

http://newosxbook.com/home.html for the lazy :) They are an updated and much expanded version of "Mac OS X and iOS Internals: To the Apple′s Core" by the same author. Which in turn was an updated version of "MAC OS X Internals: A Systems Approach" by Amit Singh.

Oh, interesting. I still have Amit's book here on my shelf.

Though I see this author has also given up work on this project. And they are extremely expensive in Europe. At least Amit Singh's I could just grab on local Amazon. Levin's aren't available here.

Re: macOS Internals

#138

Post by wkat4242 »

mike_hearn wrote: post #58

macOS probably doesn't get enough love from an OS design perspective. Over the years I've had reasons to work pretty closely with the guts of all of Linux, macOS and Windows and macOS is probably my favourite, design wise, although for some tasks you can't beat the flexibility and feature set of Linux. A few highlights that are lesser known: - XPC/Mach is a pretty reasonable IPC system that avoids the huge complexity…

> Ditto for CPU architecture migrations. Apple's skill at these has become rather legendary now. I remember a time when the computer industry assumed such transitions were simply impossible, Apple did it twice!

Three times actually. Motorola -> PowerPC. PowerPC -> Intel. Intel -> Apple Silicon.

Edit: Oops this was already mentioned elsewhere in this long thread sorry.

Re: macOS Internals

#139

Post by pornel »

pjmlp wrote: post #64
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #40

If this kind of thing interests you: late-2000's/early-2010's Apple had some fantastic documentation, but it's all hidden in the “documentation archive” ( https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/navigation/ ).

Only available to us old timers really, as newer devs on the ecosystem don't even know what to search for. I don't get it how they messed this up.

My best guess is that as macOS aged and became harder to keep backwards-compatible, their dev communication changed from "you must not rely on implementation details" to "you must not know about implementation details".

Re: macOS Internals

#140

Post by efreak »

fatneckbeard wrote: post #130
LeFantome wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that is it worked on Windows as well ( up until Windows ME ), load DOS first and then Windows. You could still do it that way if you want. Windows 11 needs a boot loader. No reason you cannot write a DOS based one. The comment about game.exe above probably refers to the days of “DOS Extenders” that games were based on. You would launch a game from DOS and, instead of just running a 16 bit DOS executable, it wou…

dos.exe was kind of referring to how a lot of games would just completely ignore DOS even before the days of protected mode and 32 bits, im going back to the 8088 days. but yeah same idea. actually now that i remember it, my first linux was a copy of ... i think Dragon Linux? It used Dos as a bootloader, it ran off the existing DOS FAT filesystem so you didnt have to mess with partitions, and it dealt with the filena…

Interesting. An odd rabbit hole. I've never heard of this kind of thing existing before Ubuntu wubi, (though I don't know why that surprises me, it's not like they're was no need for such a thing before that):

> DragonLinux was a distribution of Linux that had the ability to be installed on a loopback file on an existing FAT16 or FAT32 partition.

https://sourceforge.net/apps/wordpress/dragonlinux/

In the readme linked there, it says something different:

> DragonLinux is a Linux distribution which runs on top of windows with no partitioning needed as long as the Windows OS is sitting on a FAT32 partition. DragonLinux is fully supported on Windows ME and below. Work for support with Windows 2000 and Windows XP is in the works. > > DragonLinux is a UMSDOS distribution, compared to a Loopback filesystem of vr2r1... That change was made to eliminate the 2GB disk space boundary with the previous version, and to simplify installation and expansion (ie the file system grows as needed). > > The Full Version is a fully loaded version with GNome and several other smaller window managers, and the full line of tools for GNome. The lite version is a full console version with everything from the full version excluding the X environment, therefore being able to be run on older machines.

Looking this up more brings me to umsdos project, a filesystem that apparently runs on top of another filesystem

https://tldp.org/HOWTO/UMSDOS-HOWTO.html and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAT_filesystem_and_Linux

This brings me to loadlin:

> loadlin is a Linux boot loader that runs under 16-bit real-mode DOS (including the MS-DOS mode of Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me startup disk). It allows the Linux system to load and replace the running DOS without altering existing DOS system files.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loadlin

And then there's also grub4dos

https://github.com/chenall/grub4dos

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