Apple & FreeBSD relationship

[David Kelly]

On Mar 9, 2011, at 4:50 PM, Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC wrote:

> There are some/a few/several people working at Apple that play or used to play a large role in FreeBSD.  So they were basically paying these people's salaries for their day job which allowed them to be active in FreeBSD.  Also, there is some code put-back I believe.

Of particular note was the contributions of patches to fix NFS race conditions. Plus tools to stress and duplicate those conditions.

> Most of what Apple used from FreeBSD was the userland and the kernel interface so that the Darwin kernel could be used with FreeBSD userland utilities that affect the kernel etc.    Mac OS X uses a totally different underlying kernel and architecture but made a FreeBSD like kernel interface in order to be able to use certain sets of FreeBSD stuff.

Believe a number of FreeBSD drivers made it into MacOS X. Don't know of any Apple product which used Intel Etherexpress Pro chipsets but I popped a PCI card in a Mac one day and it magically worked as if it had always been there.

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