MAC OS X connection to FreeBSD?

[David Kelly]

On Mon, Nov 06, 2006 at 06:48:28AM -0500, Lonnie Cumberland wrote:
> Thanks everyone for the replay to my post as it did finally occur to
> me that perhaps this question had been asked on the mailing list, but
> unfortunately it occurred to me after I sent it.
> 
> So, basically the Apple team took FreeBSD and the CM micro-kernel,
> combined them, made some improvements and added some additional code
> and then used it all as the MAC OS X core (without the GUI of course)?

Yes, basically. FreeBSD is free for the taking, so Apple took. Steve
Jobs' NeXT team had a lot of familiarity with Mach, so they took from
there also too. A good number of well known FreeBSD people now work for
Apple, there are a number of FreeBSD device drivers shipping with MacOS
X. On a lark I put an Intel Etherexpress Pro 10/100B in my G4 Mac and
everything simply magically worked. No driver install, nothing.

> With this being said, then does anyone have any experience with the 
> stability and performance?

Millions of MacOS X users.

> My guess is that if it is really based upon FreeBSD then the
> performance should be pretty good from my readings about FreeBSD
> compared to other operating systems.

Having both I'd say not. FreeBSD performs better at most server-oriented
tasks than the non-server tuned MacOS X. Have not used MacOS X Server.
Am not familiar with the tuning tweaks in plain old Darwin. Remember the
MacOS/Darwin kernel is greatly different from FreeBSD. Believe it was
McKusik who said to the effect, "The differnce between Linuxes is they
all have the same kernel, everything else is different. The difference
between BSDs is that they all have different kernels, everything else is
the same." Is not exactly true but contains a lot of truth. MacOS
X/Darwin is a recognized BSD variant.

-- 
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly at HiWAAY.net
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Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.