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

Apple’s Darwin OS and XNU Kernel Deep Dive

tansanrao.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 186 posts

Re: Apple’s Darwin OS and XNU Kernel Deep Dive

#5

Post by jshier »

whalesalad wrote: post #3

I’ve been wanting to understand Darwin at this depth for a long time. Great read!

Mac OS X Internals by Singh is one of my favorite books, such a great in depth examination of Mac OS X circa 10.4. I really wish there was an updated version.

Edit: I see it's even cited at the end of this article. Truly a source for the (macOS) ages.

Re: Apple’s Darwin OS and XNU Kernel Deep Dive

#6

Post by bch »

> Mach’s virtual memory (VM) system was influential beyond the project – it was adopted by 4.4BSD and later FreeBSD as their memory management subsystem.

…and NetBSD[0], OpenBSD[1], but apparently not DragonFly BSD[2].

[0] https://netbsd.org/docs/kernel/uvm.html

[1] https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-3.0/uvm.9

[2] https://www.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2011-04/msg0...

Re: Apple’s Darwin OS and XNU Kernel Deep Dive

#7

Post by tansanrao »

bch wrote: post #6

> Mach’s virtual memory (VM) system was influential beyond the project – it was adopted by 4.4BSD and later FreeBSD as their memory management subsystem. …and NetBSD[0], OpenBSD[1], but apparently not DragonFly BSD[2]. [0] https://netbsd.org/docs/kernel/uvm.html [1] https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-3.0/uvm.9 [2] https://www.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2011-04/msg0...

Ohhh interesting! I’ll update the post to include this soon, thanks!

Re: Apple’s Darwin OS and XNU Kernel Deep Dive

#8

Post by swatson741 »

Whenever I see the Darwin kernel brought into the discussion I can't help but wonder how different things could have been if Apple had just forked Linux and ran their OS services on top of that.

Especially when I think about how committed they are to Darwin it really paints a poor image in my mind. The loss that open source suffers from that, and the time and money Apple has to dedicate to this with a disproportionate return.

Re: Apple’s Darwin OS and XNU Kernel Deep Dive

#9

Post by kccqzy »

whalesalad wrote: post #3

I’ve been wanting to understand Darwin at this depth for a long time. Great read!

I've also wanted to understand Windows NT at this depth for a while. Skip the Win32 stuff, and discuss what's underneath it. As I understand Win32 is just one personality; there was also Windows Services for UNIX in the Windows XP days and Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications in Windows Vista. The underlying NT kernel is flexible enough to allow POSIX compliance. That would be an interesting read.

Re: Apple’s Darwin OS and XNU Kernel Deep Dive

#10

Post by skissane »

swatson741 wrote: post #8

Whenever I see the Darwin kernel brought into the discussion I can't help but wonder how different things could have been if Apple had just forked Linux and ran their OS services on top of that. Especially when I think about how committed they are to Darwin it really paints a poor image in my mind. The loss that open source suffers from that, and the time and money Apple has to dedicate to this with a disproportionat…

> Whenever I see the Darwin kernel brought into the discussion I can't help but wonder how different things could have been if Apple had just forked Linux

XNU is only partially open sourced – the core is open sourced, but significant chunks are missing, e.g. APFS filesystem.

Forking Linux might have legally compelled them to make all kernel modules open source–which while that would likely be a positive for humanity, isn't what Apple wants to do

Post reply on HN