There’s an interesting interview with the project leader for Gentoo Linux PPC and Gentoo Mac OS, a Portage port to PPC.
Gentoo Linux/MacOS Interview
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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He calls OS X and Darwin bloated and slow?! I like Gentoo (I run Yoper) and know OS X has eye candy but to call the Darwin kernel bloated and slow compared to Linux…
Do you have any evidence to prove otherwise. At least, I know he is a developer and hacker that works on OS X, Darwin and Linux, so I can give him the benefit of the doubt. But you have yet to provide any sources that nullifies his statement.
I also think you are taking his statement out of context. I think he was speaking in terms of customization, flexibility and optimizations. Besides, from a gentoo user’s perspective, naturally OS X is bloated and slow. I haven’t played around with Darwin, but I’ll be surprised if it is as capable and mature as Linux is.
From my understanding Darwin was once BSD. So I think it’s going to be more then capiable of keeping up with linux. It could be just the custom Apple handles that where added that might slow the whole thing down.
No, the onus is on the person who claimed that Darwin is bloated to prove his claim. It’s pretty much FUD to claim that Linux is faster than OS X and then provide no benchmarks or sources to back up his claim.
Developers are human too, and thus exhibit bias that all of us are capable off.
For some people OS X or Darwin might be too slow or bloated. Companies wanting to squeeze every last bit of performance out of their server farm might choose to install a customized Operating System to do the job. Boeing for instance used a G5 based Gentoo Linux solution for its satellite software.
“Gentoo Mac OS, a Portage port to PPC.”
This sounds like it was written by a “technology expert”. There is a little difference between the hardware paltform and the operating system.
Gentoo Linux/PPC is a port of Gentoo Linux (and therefore portage too) to PPC. Gentoo MacOS (sic) is a port of Portage to Mac OS X.
Eugenia, please correct this.
No, it wasn’t. They took a good portion of networking from BSD, as you can find on Apple’s FAQ on that matter. That’s about it as far as BSD is concerned.
“At its foundation is Darwin, which actually contains two layers of its own: the Mach kernel and the BSD subsystem wrapped around it.
…
Darwin also incorporates a full implementation of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) UNIX, welded on top of the Mach kernel. The hybrid BSD architecture adopted by Darwin embodies its historical association with the BSD code base and underscores both the project’s strong relationship with the various BSD organizations and its strong cultural affinity with the open source developer community. Indeed, Darwin itself constitutes a full-blown operating system, complete in and of itself, made available as open source by Apple — a fact that’s both astonishing and under-appreciated.”
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/history.html
now if only I wasn’t broke.. I can’t afford one of those nifty PPC970 dual machines, those babies look sweet, but they do make up about.. every penny I make in a year.
Oh yay, just what we need! Another packaging system for OS X. Let’s see, there’s fink and apt-get/dpkg, DarwinPorts, pkgsrc, epkg, dmg, pkg, and now also portage.
Slightly related: can anyone help me to MagicPoint binaries for OS X? I know epkg and DarwinPorts have it, but I am none too happy about having to install another packaging system and a slew of dependencies (that I already have, but from different package systems) just to get mgp, and the source won’t compile…
“I can’t afford one of those nifty PPC970 dual machines”
Nobody says you need a dual PPC970 to run this. You could get a second hand powermac (almost any model should be good, as long as it’s not a NuBus based one), or you could try with Darwin/x86.
…and that’s the reason why having another packaging system can’t really hurt in the *nix world: You never get the tool you want in the package format you need.
Here at work I’m running a 400 MHz G4 with OS X 10.3.5.
This machine runs fast.
I just run Office, Firefox and Remote Desktop where I manage a couple hundred macs on the network.
We even have many iMac G3’s running 10.3.5 as well. The mahines run fine, as they all log-in to OS X servers.
Apple has done a better job at making OS X work great even on old machines.
i guess darwin is not bloated, but os-x and all the stuff that sits on top darwin is. for example the gui, is one of the slowest out there.
just a guess, i’m no developer.
I just want to add my two cents to the discussion on Darwin and bloat. Darwin is a union of Mach and BSD. Neither of these systems is particularly bloat-inspiring.
Mach is a microkernel, and one feature of microkernels is that you don’t have to have the stuff you don’t need resident in memory. I don’t think this accounts for bloat.
BSD, compared to GNU, is a very lean system. One reason that getting Linux applications to work on Darwin can be hard is that these applications often use all kinds of glibc-specific functions that BSD libcs don’t have.
Then where does the bloat sentiment come from? I think it’s the all-in-one approach that Apple takes. I did a base install of OS X on my iBook, and it was pretty hefty (sorry, don’t remember specifics) and installed all kinds of things that I don’t even know about, let alone know how to use. You can get a C compiler by installing the developer tools – the whole CDful of them. The list goes on.
I have both OS X and Debian on my iBook, but I only actually use Debian. It is more responsive and has more software I use, despite a smaller installed size. Programs start quicker (very important on Unix-like systems), and the system eats less memory. The GUI actually responds when I click, whereas in Aqua, the action is really performed sometime after.
On the other hand, Apple is often commended for making newer releases of OS X run faster, especially on older (G3) hardware. It’s all relative, I guess.
On the other hand, Apple is often commended for making newer releases of OS X run faster, especially on older (G3) hardware. It’s all relative, I guess.>>
Which version of OS X are you using? If it’s anything before 10.3, it’s going to be rather slow.
More people will find out that there is life beyond AMD/Intel.
Exactly! And that’s probably also the reason why he is developing for OSX. Oh, wait …
Darwin is in no way a modern 4.4BSD system.
Darwin is a much older BSD, with the critical VM and
process handling parts replaced by the ill-fated Mach
“microkernel” that turned out to be not so micro at all.
Get the lmbench kernel benchmark and test this if you
don’t believe me. Linux blows Darwin away.
Not that it matters: Apple is selling an integrated
kernel+GUI+hardware+apps solution. Slow as it is, the
Darwin kernel is enough to get the job done OK.
I don’t know what lmbench does, but in stuff like Scimark and almabench OS X is faster than Linux on the equivalent hardware.
I don’t know what lmbench does, but in stuff like Scimark and almabench OS X is faster than Linux on the equivalent hardware
Could you explain what you mean by ‘equivalent hardware’. Surely it would be a better to benchmark using the same hardware.
Some people don’t want to dual boot. And since Apple’s hardware is pretty much standard across models, you can easily get two equivalently speced iBook G3 800 and bench them.