Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Announces Mac OS X 'Mavericks'

macrumors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 130 posts

Re: Apple Announces Mac OS X 'Mavericks'

#111

Post by outside2344 »

niels_olson wrote: post #94
Watabou wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too actually, Mavericks sounds pretty lame compared to the great cat releases.

Are you serious? Mavericks is awesome. One of the greatest surf breaks ever. Every bit as lethal as any of those cats and more a testament to human achievement. Personally I am looking forward to releases like Cloudbreak, Teahupoo, Waimea, and Shipsterns.

It can only be places that inspire them near their offices, so expect a good stream of Californian and Chinese names. Probably mostly Chinese given that most of the sweatshops are there.

Re: Apple Announces Mac OS X 'Mavericks'

#113

Post by jammi »

binarycrusader wrote: post #99
cjensen wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, Apple are claiming the ability to install both 32-bit and 64-bit kernels on a single disk, and select the correct one at boot time so that boot disks are transportable between 64-bit and 32-bit machines. OS X has had this ability since 64-bit PPC days.

I'll clarify then: I believe Solaris has had the first part (ability to boot into a 32-bit or 64-bit kernel) since 1998. That's well before Apple even provided a 64-bit kernel or ever shipped an OS X release. Solaris has long had a single, unified architecture for 32-bit and 64-bit and until recently delivered both a 32-bit and 64-bit kernel on a single disk. That's why on Solaris you'll generally find the 32-bit lib…

What are these significant performance tradeoffs you're talking about? Tell me more about them and where you can experience them.

Re: Apple Announces Mac OS X 'Mavericks'

#114

Post by sciurus »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #98
asveikau wrote: post #62

Not a lot of technical specificity around "memory compression". Edit: Ok, I stand corrected, somebody's done some research and found the code. Windows 8 does a similar-sounding trick. At some timer interrupts they de-dupe pages and make them copy-on-write when they are identical. I seem to recall also reading that some VM products (VMware?) do this - so if you have a few instances of the same OS, only unique pages en…

Google added this to the Linux kernel quite some time ago for Android. Basically, it inserts a step before the "move to swap" step where it compresses the page. This a) allows Linux to write a compressed page to swap which allows both faster writes but also faster reads, b) allows you to use more memory before hitting swap. Major distros are considering enabling this functionality in their kernels by default. What yo…

Are you sure Google gets the credit for this?

Memory compression still hasn't been merged into mainline linux; right now it's looking like zswap will make it into 3.11. I think zswap was developed by IBM.

I think kernel samepage merging was developed by Red Hat.

https://lwn.net/Articles/551401/

https://lwn.net/Articles/545244/

https://lwn.net/Articles/330589/

Re: Apple Announces Mac OS X 'Mavericks'

#115

Post by lukifer »

meerita wrote: post #54
lukifer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all knew a UI refresh was coming, but most of the iOS7 interface concepts were unexpected. Same with trashcan Mac Pro and 12hr Air: we knew there'd be refreshes, but the details were surprising. Also, while there's not much glitz to 10.9, the list of iterative improvements is extremely promising, assuming it delivers.

Also, how can we forget the infamous and most hyped iWatch. I was so happy they didn't make it.

I love my NanoWatch to pieces, and eagerly await any company that can make something better. But it's not really something I see fitting into the Apple way.

Re: Apple Announces Mac OS X 'Mavericks'

#116

Post by [deleted] »

JosephBrown wrote: post #20
seclorum wrote: post #13

Store my keychain on the iCloud, eh? Is this going to be the default behaviour now? If so, I guess I'm abandoning Apple faster than I thought I would, a day or so ago .

Lots of people are already doing this with 1Password either in iCloud or on Dropbox. As long as it's encrypted with the appropriate algorithms, what's the issue?

[deleted]

Re: Apple Announces Mac OS X 'Mavericks'

#117

Post by binarycrusader »

millstone wrote: post #109
binarycrusader wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. With that said, OS X's hack support for 64-bit applications on a 32-bit kernel certainly wasn't at the same performance level as a 64-bit kernel as they claim. It's a dubious achievement at best given the performance tradeoffs.

It seems like you are casting aspersions. In what way was it a "hack" and what performance tradeoffs were there? Apple's claim is that 64 bit apps ran at native speeds, which is true, since they just used the native ISA. Apple lists a few benefits of K64 at https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/MacOS... , specifically more efficient support for systems with lots of RAM, a larger buffer cache, and bet…

I don't need to cast aspersions.

Apple's claims about performance primarily applied to OS X when run on a specific version of the PowerPC processor:

http://www.ece.uprm.edu/~nayda/Courses/Inel4215F03/power64.p...

(See pages 304-306.)

But, there was a cost to that dependent on architecture. If you read the document I linked above, you'll see that there is a cost to this 64-bit translation -- the performance is not completely equivalent to a 64-bit application running on a 64-bit kernel where there is no need for translation.

And yes, there were performance tradeoffs. A 64-bit application running on a 32-bit OS still had all of the 32-bit limitations enforced (limit on maximum process size, number of file descriptors, etc.).

And once Apple made the transition to x86 from PowerPC they lost the built-in hardware advantage. x86 can also run 64-bit applications on a 32-bit kernel, but the cost of doing that hardware switch is not as cheap as it was on PowerPC. I also think it's very telling that Solaris, Linux, and Windows opted to never do this as well.

And now that OS X no longer offers a 32-bit kernel, this all seems moot anyway.

Re: Apple Announces Mac OS X 'Mavericks'

#118

Post by nodata »

meepmorp wrote: post #110
nodata wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So let's see... in Firefox I have FIVE apple logins saved, because they can't decide on which url to use: * appleid.apple.com * daw.apple.com * id.apple.com * secure1.store.apple.com * secure2.store.apple.com If they have trouble getting something as simple as that right, I'd like them to stay away from my keychain.

I don't think Firefox saves logins in the OS X keychain, and mapping which credentials go with which urls is something that Firefox is responsible for, not Apple.

Apple doesn't have a consistent single login url. Firefox isn't to blame for that.

Re: Apple Announces Mac OS X 'Mavericks'

#119

Post by [deleted] »

binarycrusader wrote: post #117
millstone wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like you are casting aspersions. In what way was it a "hack" and what performance tradeoffs were there? Apple's claim is that 64 bit apps ran at native speeds, which is true, since they just used the native ISA. Apple lists a few benefits of K64 at https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/MacOS... , specifically more efficient support for systems with lots of RAM, a larger buffer cache, and bet…

I don't need to cast aspersions. Apple's claims about performance primarily applied to OS X when run on a specific version of the PowerPC processor: http://www.ece.uprm.edu/~nayda/Courses/Inel4215F03/power64.p... (See pages 304-306.) But, there was a cost to that dependent on architecture. If you read the document I linked above, you'll see that there is a cost to this 64-bit translation -- the performance is not com…

[deleted]

Re: Apple Announces Mac OS X 'Mavericks'

#120

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #119
binarycrusader wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't need to cast aspersions. Apple's claims about performance primarily applied to OS X when run on a specific version of the PowerPC processor: http://www.ece.uprm.edu/~nayda/Courses/Inel4215F03/power64.p... (See pages 304-306.) But, there was a cost to that dependent on architecture. If you read the document I linked above, you'll see that there is a cost to this 64-bit translation -- the performance is not com…

[deleted]

[deleted]
Post reply on HN