Apple's contribution to FreeBSD

Robert Watson rwatson at freebsd.org
Thu Jul 29 16:45:21 PDT 2004


On Tue, 20 Jul 2004, Paul Robinson wrote:

> As I understand it, all of userland, plus they stole Jordan Hubbard. :-) 
> 
> The kernel is based on Mach, not FreeBSD,

They use Mach for scheduler and VM.  They use IOKit, which is their own
custom device driver framework.  However, the network stack, VFS and many
file systems, and several higher level IPC subsystems in the kernel come
straight for FreeBSD.  So I would say your statement is pretty inaccurate. 
You should take a look at:

    http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/bsd/?v=DARWIN7

It should look pretty familiar.  Apple makes extensive use of open source
for lower level operating system frameworks, application services, etc,
and participats actively in many of the open source communities associated
with those projects.

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Principal Research Scientist, McAfee Research




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