If the BSD become known as Linux, BSD distributions will be millions just like there are on Linux?

[Tim Daneliuk]

On 03/12/2014 12:30 PM, Chad Leigh Shire.Net LLC wrote:
>
> On Mar 12, 2014, at 11:23 AM, dteske at FreeBSD.org wrote:
>
>>
>> But let's take a step back for a moment...
>>
>> Apple's Mac OS X is based on BSD and has a wider install base than Linux. So
>> in that respect, BSD is already doing great.
>
> OS X is not based on BSD.  It is a mach based kernel,

Mach is not a kernel.  It is a micro-kernel designed to *host* full kernels.

> with a custom graphical interface unrelated to X Windows.

That part is only sort of true.  It is possible to run X programs under Aqua.

>   It does have a BSD type user land available, and a BSD type kernel interface to enable the user land.
> It is more correct, I think, to say that OS X and BSD share some heritage.
>
> Chad

Well considering that major parts of OSX initially came from FBSD 4.x
and that includes the kernel itself as well as much of the support infrastructure,
I think this is fundamentally incorrect.

OTOH, OSX isn't really BSD any more (to the extent it ever was).  It's best
described - I think - as "derived from FreeBSD" because they've changed things
like filesystem case sensitivity, they us HPFS instead of FFS/UFS/XFS, the
filesystem layout is different, and so forth.  They've also added a bunch
of Apple-specific APIs.

As to what is userland and not, I think this is kind of a moot thing these
days.  I happily move across userlands on OS/X, Redhat, Debian, AIX, FreeBSD, and
so on with very little cognitive shift.  The biggest differences among these
are the tools (like compilers) and locations/layouts for the aforementioned
system admin and control files.


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Tim Daneliuk     tundra at tundraware.com
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