MAC OS X connection to FreeBSD?

[Garrett Cooper]

On Nov 6, 2006, at 3:48 AM, 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)?

As others have discussed, the Apple devs took the FreeBSD userland  
and CM micro-kernel, combined them, provided quite a few bug fixes  
via debugging, and have continued to work with the BSD community in  
an effort to better support many things in BSD, some being Apple  
hardwire, others being Apple "endorsed" technologies (firewire,  
bluetooth, USB, etc).

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

Yes, millions of users as David Kelley said, and I personally must  
say that OSX is a solid OS for user applications. That is based not  
only on the fact that Apple develops alongside the opensource/BSD  
community and that the majority of their applications are developed  
in-house, but it is also because Apple works with limited vendors and  
hardware, and tests the heck out of their systems before releasing  
them onto market. So, they control the ubiquity of their products in  
a sense and can guarantee a higher level of service in most cases.

> 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.

Again though, FreeBSD is a solid platform and it is well developed,  
based upon its completeness and design, user community, and developer  
community, when compared to many other OSes.

> Thanks again to everyone,
> Cheers,
> Lonnie