On Sat, May 18, 2002 at 02:30:09PM -0400, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> On Sat, May 18, 2002 at 01:12:05PM -0400, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> > 
> > I didn't know that, but it wouldn't be surprising. The kernel is
> > basically a modified FreeBSD 3.x, which was what I was referring to.
> 
> Uh, no.  Not any more than the NextStep kernel was "basically a modified
> 4.3BSD".

For the purposes of this discussion, my statement was accurate enough.
I didn't think a full discussion of the BSD/Mach combination was needed.

FreeBSD definitely is sitting on the mix.  Mach does virtual memory and
machine independent code.  They moved drivers to the IOKit.  BSD provides
the interface to all of these things.

MacOS X/Darwin is NOT a microkernel OS, despite use of Mach.  The BSD,
Mach, and IOKit pieces are in a shared memory space.  They did this for
speed and simplicity.

The most fundamental difference seems to be IOKit.  Yes, virtual memory
is in the Mach piece, but IOKit is more interesting.

MacOS X/Darwin is still very much a BSD UNIX.  NeXT was a whole lot
like this.

-- 
UNIX/Perl/C/Pizza__________________________________shannon@widomaker.com