A few days ago Apple announced the release of Darwin 6.0.1. This release of Darwin is in sync with Mac OS X 10.2 aka Jaguar and includes “enhancements from FreeBSD 4.4” and is built with GCC3.1. Seperately, the OpenDarwin project today announced an initial beta of the new DarwinPorts system, designed by Jordan Hubbard formerly of the FreeBSD project.
Darwin 6.0 Released and DarwinPorts Initial Release
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What else to say, Darwinports filled the only missing gap for me. Don’t get me wrong, fink was there already but with the Jordan’s experience with ports this should be the best packaging solution out there. Not only you can build application from source, you can also make .pkg and distribute it for people without developer tools.
Great!
Thanks Jordan, thanks everyone at Opendarwin
there is only one cd image for power pc, isn’t have the i386 cd image, I want to installed on my I386 box, but how can I do?
any help are appreciated.
Can someone enlighten me about Darwin: What do I get if I install it? How is it diffrent from the other *BSD’s ? How is it diffrent from MacOSX ? Does it come with XFree and a desktop(KDE/GNOME)? Or some frambuffer ?
Very grossly:
Darwin is the BSD with a micro-kernel (very grossly indeed. Yamit and xMach are 2 others, but none is running).
Mac OS X is Darwin + Aqua
Xfree has been ported and runs on Darwin and Mac OS X (XDarwin). I know WindowMaker has been ported too.
I should have say: Yamit and XMach are 2 projects. Seems the first has been abandoned.
and gnustep are my xdarwin windowmanager desktops tools.
i386 version of darwin is not ready yet.
The darwin ports is an effort of http://www.opendarwin.org and integrates fairly well with fink. Hence Fink will be able to use the port collection and vice-versa.
The ports is a switch, previous managment had bet on the openpackage effort.
Other answser :
Installing darwin is straitgh forward. The Hardware support for x86 is very limited, but is there. You can join the x86 list dev to follow on the development of darwin on x86 (see http://lists.apple.com ).
Thoss wanting to install the new release might want to install darwin 1.4.1 and build the new version but this is very hard to achieve. [this is for the i386 familly of course]
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http://islande.hirlimann.net
Darwin (like ALL operating systems) is a work in progress. I am curious about how much optimization has been done. Hopefully someone will compare FreeBSD 4.4 with Darwin, to get a picture of what runs well, and where there is more work to do. Clearly, 4.4 has been around longer, and SHOULD do better in most areas, but this type of comparison would give an indication of how much polish Apple software developers applied, verses the demand to ship a product.
In many ways, they are ‘under the gun’ to move more quickly than anyone else. MS has the market. ’nuff said. In a very real way, the BSD’s Linux and all open source projects (as a whole) don’t have to worry about a quarterly financial statement. They do have to maintain momentum and developer interest.
It’s been noted in several places on the web that Darwin/OSX is catching on in the Linux/BSD/Unix world. I’m looking forward to seeing the Darwin community grow.
MikeVF
Apple is definitely “FreeBSD”izing Darwin/MacOS X. Maybe with NV30 and Quartz Extreme MacOS X will finally be usable
“Xfree has been ported and runs on Darwin and Mac OS X (XDarwin). I know WindowMaker has been ported too.”
Windowmaker was one of the first Window Managers ported to Mac OS X/Darwin. Now there are many more, such as AfterStep, FVWM, Enlightenment and GNOME. The KDE port is still in beta.
Hopefully someone will compare FreeBSD 4.4 with Darwin, to get a picture of what runs well, and where there is more work to do. Clearly, 4.4 has been around longer, and SHOULD do better in most areas, but this type of comparison would give an indication of how much polish Apple software developers applied, verses the demand to ship a product.
I’ve never been able to find out about the technical details of XNU, most likely because most of XNU’s development is done internally within Apple and consequently there are no mailing lists to search for the state of certain features.
As far as I can tell though, XNU is lacking many “modern” improvements one is seeing occur in kernels like Linux’s and FreeBSD’s (e.g. zero copy TCP/IP, NFS) I’ve also heard many reports of both low performance and odd behavior with the Mach VMM used in XNU. Likewise, due to the use of Mach process management, the SMP improvements made in FreeBSD 5.0’s SMPng are likely incompatible with XNU. Lacking an SMP Mac, I can’t really say much from personal experience about XNU’s SMP performance, only that I’ve only heard negative things about it.
I understand Apple’s motivation in wanting their own kernel that they have absolute control over, however I think that many of the lingering Mach components (primarily the process management and VMM) are not up-to-par with their BSD counterparts. If I were Apple, I would attempt to merge more of the FreeBSD kernel source into XNU as I think this would greatly improve performance overall, especially in the SMP realm.
I have been having real problems recompiling software under OS X. Is it not a FreeBSD 4.4 evolution? Why it lack of so much functions and header files? In fact, today I have been trying to recompile SmallTalk under OS X and I dismiss. In the other hand, over FreeBSD and Linux Slackware it work fine. And as I said, it’s not the first time I have this problem.
By the way. Somebody knows if OS X 10.2 have improbed POSIX? I’m using OS X 10.1.5