The core of OS X is the Darwin operating system. The original NeXTSTEP system was based on CMU’s Mach operating system, with a single BSD server providing a lot of the services usually associated with a kernel. Mach is a microkernel, a very simple kernel that tries to do as little as possible. There are two ways of using a microkernel. The intended design is to decompose the kernel into a set of different components, called servers, each providing some aspects of the operating system’s functionality. The other alternative is to run a single server that does everything. The latter approach is used by OS X. For efficiency reasons, the single BSD server runs inside the kernel’s address space, eliminating a lot of the performance problems that plagued early Mach-based systems at the cost of most of the stability advantages that Mach brought over traditional UNIX-like systems. When Apple acquired NeXT, it began updating the core operating system with code from NetBSD, and later from FreeBSD. The early userland contained a mixture of utilities from NeXTSTEP, FreeBSD, and GNU. A lot of the older NeXTSTEP code has now been removed. The init system and a number of related systems such as cron and inetd were rolled into Launchd, and the NetInfo directory service from NeXTSTEP was replaced with LDAP and a simpler local directory system based on property lists.
The current userland is very similar to a FreeBSD system, with some Apple embellishments. A few changes were made to make Linux users feel more at home, for example, including the GNU shell, bash, rather than a C shell, as the default. Several other GNU utilities are also included, replacing the FreeBSD equivalents. The biggest difference between Darwin and most other open-source UNIX-like systems is that it does not use the GNU binary utilities. While other systems use the Executable and Linking Format (ELF) for binaries, Darwin uses the Mach-O format. These are roughly equivalent in terms of capabilities. To support this format, Darwin uses its own linker and loader, as well as its own tools for inspecting binaries. If you are familiar with other UNIX systems, you may be used to using ldd to inspect shared libraries. This does not exist on Darwin; its functionality is subsumed into the otool program, which provides a number of options for inspecting binary objects in Mach-O format.
As well as the binary utilities, OS X provides its own C++ standard library and a C library based on the FreeBSD version. As of 10.5, OS X was certified by The Open Group as compliant with the Single Unix Specification 2003. This means that it has the right to be described as UNIXTM, something Apple was doing already for marketing purposes. Note that the certification is per platform, as well as per version. Technically speaking, OS X on Intel is UNIX, while OS X on PowerPC is not.
Apple has released the core Darwin code as open source under a variety of licenses. Most Apple-original parts are under the Apple Public Source License (APSL), while others are under whatever license their original authors picked. It is possible to run Darwin as a stand-alone operating system, although this is not a popular choice. Until 10.5 (Darwin 9), kernel performance was markedly inferior to other open source UNIX-like systems. There are also some limitations. On most other UNIX systems, sound is generated by writing to /dev/dsp or a similar location. On OS X, there is no low-level access to the sound hardware from userspace, all sound goes through Core Audio, which is not open source.
This means sound is not easily supported by Darwin unless you want to go to the trouble of writing a replacement that interfaces to the top layers of the drivers directly. A similar situation exists for 3D graphics. Note, by the way, that Darwin version numbers correspond directly to version numbers from NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. The first release of OS X was Darwin 5, following on from OPENSTEP 4.
Source of Information : Addison Wesley - Cocoa Programming Developers Handbook (December 2009)
The current userland is very similar to a FreeBSD system, with some Apple embellishments. A few changes were made to make Linux users feel more at home, for example, including the GNU shell, bash, rather than a C shell, as the default. Several other GNU utilities are also included, replacing the FreeBSD equivalents. The biggest difference between Darwin and most other open-source UNIX-like systems is that it does not use the GNU binary utilities. While other systems use the Executable and Linking Format (ELF) for binaries, Darwin uses the Mach-O format. These are roughly equivalent in terms of capabilities. To support this format, Darwin uses its own linker and loader, as well as its own tools for inspecting binaries. If you are familiar with other UNIX systems, you may be used to using ldd to inspect shared libraries. This does not exist on Darwin; its functionality is subsumed into the otool program, which provides a number of options for inspecting binary objects in Mach-O format.
As well as the binary utilities, OS X provides its own C++ standard library and a C library based on the FreeBSD version. As of 10.5, OS X was certified by The Open Group as compliant with the Single Unix Specification 2003. This means that it has the right to be described as UNIXTM, something Apple was doing already for marketing purposes. Note that the certification is per platform, as well as per version. Technically speaking, OS X on Intel is UNIX, while OS X on PowerPC is not.
Apple has released the core Darwin code as open source under a variety of licenses. Most Apple-original parts are under the Apple Public Source License (APSL), while others are under whatever license their original authors picked. It is possible to run Darwin as a stand-alone operating system, although this is not a popular choice. Until 10.5 (Darwin 9), kernel performance was markedly inferior to other open source UNIX-like systems. There are also some limitations. On most other UNIX systems, sound is generated by writing to /dev/dsp or a similar location. On OS X, there is no low-level access to the sound hardware from userspace, all sound goes through Core Audio, which is not open source.
This means sound is not easily supported by Darwin unless you want to go to the trouble of writing a replacement that interfaces to the top layers of the drivers directly. A similar situation exists for 3D graphics. Note, by the way, that Darwin version numbers correspond directly to version numbers from NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. The first release of OS X was Darwin 5, following on from OPENSTEP 4.
Source of Information : Addison Wesley - Cocoa Programming Developers Handbook (December 2009)
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