Mac osX drivers

[Chuck Swiger]

On Mar 24, 2008, at 1:19 PM, David Kelly wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 02:26:23PM +1000, Da Rock wrote:
>> I know I keep asking about drivers, but what about Mac drivers? I
>> understand that Mac osX is based fairly well on BSD, so would the
>> drivers be portable?
>
> Drivers for doing what?
>
>> This is all on a current project I'm working on...
>
> Go study the available Darwin code from
> http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/

This is good advice, but if you check this link and actually look at  
the OSX drivers under there, you'll discover that they are generally  
written in C++ using something called the I/O Kit, documented here:

http://developer.apple.com/reference/HardwareDrivers/
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeviceDrivers/Conceptual/IOKitFundamentals

> I believe you will discover many of the drivers in MacOS X came from  
> FreeBSD.

Not really, no.  The OS X drivers originated from the Mach project at  
CMU and NeXT Computer back in the early 90's [1], with a significant  
rewrite by Apple after they acquired NeXT circa 1998 to add numerous  
drivers to support Apple's hardware in particular.

-- 
-Chuck

[1]: NeXT started in the late 80's (1987 or so), but the driver source  
code actually in use in OSX now had some origins back to 1994 or so,  
and almost all of it was updated significantly around 1998-2000 (aka  
Rhapsody through 10.1 or so timeframe), with smaller changes being  
made since...