OSNews regular Kaiwai, who we all love and hate at the same time, has written a fairly detailed article about the latest Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard build, seed 10A355. He covers the changes made, the status of the transition to 64bit, and more.
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Member since:2007-07-27
i'd agree that kawai doesn't seem to know enough about the innards of osx to draw enlightening conclusions from the stuff he sees. neither do i, but maybe somebody here can answer the questions which kawai asked? you don't even need to break your nda, kawai did that part for you! ;-)
for example, why would you compile stuff (kexts & even apps) for ppc and arm if you don't intend to ship snow leopard for that platforms? do you need them to compile apps for other platforms? or to simulate ppc & arm?
wouldn't device drivers like the one for the gma-gpus have to be in 64 bit to be able to use the 64 kernel? (ok, my question)
one question which i think i can answer: there is (and already was?) a 64-bit carbon framework because only the carbon-gui framework won't be ported to 64-bit.
Member since:2005-11-10
It could simply be that as the product is unfinished, the various builds they are doing include extra architectures added for testing. A developer may have accidentally included an ARM binary because earlier they were testing the same library on the iPhone and forgot to untick the box to remove ARM from the desktop build.
The PPC stuff is interesting though. We really don’t know where this is going. John Gruber stated quite clearly PPC was out, and Snow Leopard will be Intel only. It will be interesting if he’s wrong as he rarely makes an assertion that isn’t at least certain.
Member since:2008-07-07
PPC code might be there for Rosetta to work properly with ppc apps. You can't use a ppc plugin for an app on an intel binary. The app and the plugin have to be executed on the same architecture. I guess this would allow to continue using ppc plugins for certain programs.
This may all be totally wrong.
EDIT:
Reading the article I found out that that's Kawai's guess too.
Edited 2009-05-22 09:39 UTC
Member since:2005-07-06
I never claimed I was a guru of Mac OS X or Information Technology, I was just expecting that maybe some more knowledgeable people might be able to fill me in on the blanks. I have a very limited understanding of MacOS X but I am reading and filling in my knowledge but I would hope that a dialogue can be discussed about some of the already disclosed underlying technologies and how that compares to Leopard 10.5.
I understand there are things yet to change but I am disappointed in that x3100 and 950 are the only two graphics drivers not yet 64bit; I would have thought they would have done something like that first before moving to move complex drivers.
Member since:
2008-11-25
I don't call it detailed. In fact, the article is full of 'i guess', 'i wonder', 'i'm confused', 'if', 'maybe' and just guess works of just a guy. I hope the word 'detailed' doesn't mean 'amount of characters' in the article.
Basically you don't find anything in the article but some guy's weekend experience as an average heavy user. He keeps on talking about file size of a bundle, ppc code still floating around and a few inconsistencies (and for sake, this is far from the release version...) He probably doesn't know CUPS was bought by Apple too. And what is up with the 64bit addict of this guy? Does the world fail if the flash plugin doesn't become 64 bit? Sounds like Apple is ironing out what's important and leaving out ppc code around where it doesn't matter and can be stripped whenever they like.
Summary is, this guy got disappointed by this internal beta version, because
- Not everything is 64bit
- Not every binary is intel only
- No new cool eye candies from the user's perspective (even we know Snow Leopard is more for the internal changes).
- He doesn't understand why some kernel extensions exist and why some extensions got bigger for the reason he doesn't understand
- OS is not consistently optimized enough even if it is BETA.
- Installer finished with installing 9GB instead of the claimed 10GB.
Cease and desist of the article? Shoot away, got the summary here =p