The Darwin team is pleased to announce the availability of the Darwin 7 Preview source code corresponding to select portions of the 2003 WWDC Panther seed. Darwin and a number of other projects are available via Web DAV (as well as regular HTTP).
Darwin 7 Preview Code Posted
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Eugenia Loli
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…no fscking new binary releases to be seen. There better be one soon!
What’s the use of darwin releases? I can sort of see how one would use the source to assist in driver development or library dev. However, what’s the point of a binary release? What would you use such a best for?
Not starting a flamewar, but what does Darwin have over the Windows XP kernel, and vice versa?
1) You can’t build a Darwin release from the sources they give you. That’s just the way Darwin’s licensed. No great deal, though.
2) Darwin 6, the last binary release, needs very specific hardware. Hopefully, just hopefully, a newer release would run smoother than the last…….
Not starting a flamewar, but what does Darwin have over the Windows XP kernel, and vice versa?
Actually, they’re somewhat similar, in that they both started as microkernels and were eventually modified into monolithic kernels.
Darwin has the Mach VMM going for it. Conceivably Apple could port much of the FreeBSD VMM to Darwin, as FreeBSD’s VMM is originally based on Mach’s.
One excellent advantage that Darwin will now enjoy over Windows is a file manager which takes advantage of a file system monitoring feature. Windows seems to still employ a polling model, as files created from the command line take a short amount of time to show up on the desktop. With filesystem monitoring, this should be instantaneous. File information dialogs can be updated as a file changes, providing continuous filesystem monitoring without the need for polling.
Overall, XNU seems to remain a relatively low throughput kernel with somewhat high latency (the worst of both worlds, unfortunately) It will be very interesting to see how the Panther seed compares to the previous version. One would hope that work has been done to decrease kernel latency, which would make for the “snappier” system that everyone so desires.
Nice info, thanks Bascule.
It’s only a small section of the Darwin source code and nothing particularly interesting. No Apple stuff, no GCC, no bintools…
IMHO it’s the “cleanest” BSD available. It is, however, very “bland”. There are not may install options. After installing Darwin, you have a small and clean BSD base to build on.
Well, of course, you didn’t think Apple was going to release hot-stuff’s source code *for free*, did you?!
What the code is useful for is to port certain projects’ code and to examine code as well.
From what I have gathered Apples open source model is a PITA to work with. The only reason they have opened darwin IMO is to get free labor. In my situation darwin isn’t really a good OS to run. I still can’t use NetBSD and OpenBSD on my ibook with sound/sleep support. Know why? Because apple has chosen not to “open source” that layer. It’s a way to dilute the competition. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to troll here; Apple has released some amazing things to the community, even under the GPL. Webcore and Rendevous come to mind. But frankly why can’t they talk with the hardware suppliers and release drivers so some of us can run NetBSD and listen to Ogg Vorbis tracks?
I personally don’t see any reason to contribute bug reports or even run for that matter darwin and derivatives, because the entire system is too restriceted. I like my freedom when it comes to technology. Most of the folks on irc.freenode.net #opendarwin work for apple anyway, so there is your userbase.
> Know why? Because apple has chosen not to “open source” that layer.
It’s just like my grandmother always told me, “the GPL is your friend”.
Apple didn’t have to open source a damn thing, be greatful they gave you as much as they did.
Apple’s gotta make a living too ya know…what did you expect them to GPL the whole damn OS including Aqua, so that somebody could port that to Linux and BSD, which would effectively give you Mac OS X on WinTel boxes, which would effectively kill Apple’s most important revenue stream, which would effectively kill Apple.
<SARCASM>Yeah, the GPL is definitely your friend</SARCASM>
I still can’t use NetBSD and OpenBSD on my ibook with sound/sleep support. Know why? Because apple has chosen not to “open source” that layer.
What are you talking about? Sound drivers and Power Management source code is here:
http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.2.6/index.html
See modules AppleOnboardAudio and PowerManagement.
BTW, gcc 3.3 is in cvs, get it with
cvs -d :pserver:[email protected]:/cvs/root -z3 co -r gcc-1435 gcc3
Password is “anonymous”. This is the gcc 3.3 version from the new developer tools update.
Apple’s gotta make a living too ya know…what did you expect them to GPL the whole damn OS including Aqua,
No one’s talking about Aqua here.
The point is, regardless of whether Apple is currently “giving back all the good bits” of Darwin or not, with the current kernel license they may at any time withhold any “good bits” they so choose.
This means that if company B were to create, market, and sell a Darwin/X11 distro for Apple hardware, Apple could sink them at will by simply not sharing certain parts of their kernel required for specific proprietary Apple hardware features.
I certainly won’t argue that all software should be GPL’d, but OS kernels should be. Sorry, but you just can’t trust companies to “do the right thing”. The GPL keeps you honest.
I certainly won’t argue that all software should be GPL’d, but OS kernels should be. Sorry, but you just can’t trust companies to “do the right thing”. The GPL keeps you honest.
Not if companies infringe it :p
Not if companies infringe it :p
If they do, and you’re the copyright holder, then they’ve violated your license. If you can reasonably prove what they’ve done, you can take them to court and win.
This is why GNU asks you to assign copyright to them when contributing to GNU software — so they can send their lawyers after violators (if it even comes to that).
If they do, and you’re the copyright holder, then they’ve violated your license. If you can reasonably prove what they’ve done, you can take them to court and win.
With the exception of whistle-blowers, this, my friend is nigh-impossible.
That’s why I’d rather just accept that people are going to use my code for things I never intended and move on.