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

151–160 of 186 posts

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

#151

Post by philistine »

DeathArrow wrote: post #122
lunarlull wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't Apple have been interested in a Linux option? They bought NeXTSTEP because of Jobs. Linux was already useable as a desktop OS in 2000, and they could have added in the UX stuff and drivers for their particular macs on top of it. There wouldn't have been any downsides for them, and it would have strengthened something that was hurting their biggest rival.

>it would have strengthened something that was hurting their biggest rival. If by biggest rival you mean Microsoft, it was Microsoft who saved Apple from bancrupcy in 1997.

The investment Microsoft famously made in Apple in 1997 did not prevent Apple from going bankrupt. By the time the money was in Apple's accounts, its fortunes were already reversed.

The fact Microsoft announced they were investing, and that they were committed to continue shipping Office to Mac, definitely helped.

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

#152

Post by f33d5173 »

icedchai wrote: post #149
lunarlull wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't Apple have been interested in a Linux option? They bought NeXTSTEP because of Jobs. Linux was already useable as a desktop OS in 2000, and they could have added in the UX stuff and drivers for their particular macs on top of it. There wouldn't have been any downsides for them, and it would have strengthened something that was hurting their biggest rival.

In the early 2000's, Linux was practically unusable as a desktop OS because the only "fully functional" web browser was Internet Explorer. Netscape 4.x "worked" but was incredibly unstable and crashed roughly every half hour. Mozilla / Phoenix / Firefox wasn't done yet. Chrome didn't exist. It was a very different world. We won't even talk about audio and video playback. I was an early Linux user, having done my firs…

Safari came out in 2003.

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

#153

Post by philistine »

icedchai wrote: post #150
SG- wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

any day now, usually after 6-7 years after hardware releases.

We probably have a few more years to go then. Consider that they were still selling Mac Pro 2019 Intel systems as late as June, 2023.

I'm not convinced this year's OS release will support Intel. When they switched to Intel, Apple was quicker to dump PowerPC than people remember.

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

#154

Post by bigger_cheese »

threeseed wrote: post #15
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…

1) We are talking about the late 90s, well before Ubuntu, where Desktop Linux was pretty poor in terms of features and polish. 2) Apple had no money or time to invest in rewriting NeXTStep for a completely new kernel they had no experience in. Especially when so many of the dev team was involved in sorting out Apple's engineering and tech strategy as well as all the features needed to make it more Mac like. 3) Apple…

>1) We are talking about the late 90s, well before Ubuntu, where Desktop Linux was pretty poor in terms of features and polish.

I think it's hard to understate how much traction Linux had in the late 90's/ early 2000's. It felt like ground breaking stuff was happening pretty much all the time, major things were changing rapidly every release and it felt exciting and genuinely revolutionary to download updates and try out all the new things it really felt like you were on the bleeding edge, your system would break all the time but it was fun and exciting.

I remember reading Slashdot daily being excited to try out every new distribution I'd see on distrowatch, I'd download and build kernels fairly regularly etc.

Things I can remember from back in those days:

- LILO to GRUB boot loader changes

- Going from EXT2 to EXT3 and all the other experimental filesystems that kept coming out.

- Sound system changing from OSS to ASLA

- Introduction of /sys

- Gentoo and all the memes (funroll-loops website)

- Udev and being able to hotplug usb devices

- Signalfd

- Splice/VMsplice

- Early wireless support and the cursed "ndiswrapper"

Nowadays Linux is pretty stable and dare I say it "boring" (in a good way). It's probably mostly because I've gotten older and have way less free time to spend living on the bleeding edge. It feels like Linux has gone from something you had to wrestle with constantly to have a working system to a spot where nowadays everything "mostly works" out of the box. I can't remember last time I've had to cntrl + alt + backspace my desktop for example.

Last major thing I can remember hearing about and being excited for was io_uring.

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

#155

Post by chuckadams »

palata wrote: post #97
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…

Seen differently, I think it's great that there is yet another kernel being maintained out there. Imagine if Apple decided to open source Darwin: wouldn't that be a big win for open source?

The core of it always has been open source: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu

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

#156

Post by icedchai »

f33d5173 wrote: post #152
icedchai wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the early 2000's, Linux was practically unusable as a desktop OS because the only "fully functional" web browser was Internet Explorer. Netscape 4.x "worked" but was incredibly unstable and crashed roughly every half hour. Mozilla / Phoenix / Firefox wasn't done yet. Chrome didn't exist. It was a very different world. We won't even talk about audio and video playback. I was an early Linux user, having done my firs…

Safari came out in 2003.

Yeah, but I didn't use a Mac back then. And early 2000's web development was heavily biased towards IE.

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

#157

Post by icedchai »

philistine wrote: post #153
icedchai wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We probably have a few more years to go then. Consider that they were still selling Mac Pro 2019 Intel systems as late as June, 2023.

I'm not convinced this year's OS release will support Intel. When they switched to Intel, Apple was quicker to dump PowerPC than people remember.

I'd be surprised if they don't support it for at least one more release. With Intel, they discontinued the PowerPC systems much faster (by the end of 2006.) They were still selling Intel hardware 2 years ago, a couple years into the ARM / Apple Silicon transition.

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

#158

Post by saagarjha »

lapcat wrote: post #108
saagarjha wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you went for a lazy reply rather than actually reading the comment through. Most of the things mentioned here directly improve security for the computer's owner.

> I think you went for a lazy reply rather than actually reading the comment through. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Your reply could have omitted the first sentence. Many years ago, at Macworld San Francisco, I met "Perry the Cynic", the Apple engineer who added code signing to Mac OS X. Nice person, but I also kind of hate him and wish I could travel back in time to stop this all from happening.

It could have, but I would just replace it with the same link you posted. And we all hate Perry sometimes :)

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

#159

Post by larusso »

comex wrote: post #72
larusso wrote: post #63

I’m not sure if I/O kit was written in this c++ subset just for speed. There was this controversial at the time. Apple announced MacOS X and said that it won’t be compatible with current software. All partners would need to rewrite the software in Objective-C. This didn’t go over well. Apple back paddelt and introduced “carbon”. An API layer for cpp applications as well as “Core Foundation” an underpinning to the obj…

IOKit C++ is running in the kernel, so it's not really related to any of the technologies you mentioned which are all userland-only.

You may underestimate how many drivers had to be shipped and developed by external companies compared to today. For software / hardware companies that was a huge deal.
Post reply on HN