Quote:
Originally Posted by Doku  Just a bit of info for the BSD/OSX mini-war... BSD is to OSX like Wine is to X11. The BSD "module" in OSX allows them to run BSD binaries like the Wine "module" in Linux/X11 allows them to run windows binaries. OSX is not built on top of BSD, and Linux is not built on Wine. |
I don't completely agree with that analogy. Apple (and NEXTSTEP before Apple) used the Mach Kernel code (which was based off of BSD code) because it facilitated development time. A lot of hard problems were already solved by Mach and it's license allowed them to take that code and use it for their own purposes.
I don't believe the decision was made so that they could achieve binary compatibility with BSD programs, and OSX ships with a relatively small amount of BSD-based apps.
Also, if you remove the Mach portion of the OSX kernel, the kernel will no longer work. It is not a module, it is an integrated part of the kernel. This is in contrast with WINE on Linux, which is a module that just maps some Win32 API functionality to the Linux kernel. The Mach portion does provide the POSIX API, but it also provides many other necessary parts (TCP/IP, VFS, crypto, IPC, user management, etc.).
Also, I was not implying OS X is inferior to the BSDs. I was just arguing that it was not similar enough not to be classified in that manner. No worries, though. It's all in good fun.
