BSD & Darwin Archive

OpenDarwin 6.6.1 is announced, available immediately for both ppc and x86 architectures. OpenDarwin 6.6.1 is based on the Darwin 6.6 (which corresponds to Mac OS X 10.2.6) source release and licensed under the APSL. It includes additions and modifications from the OpenDarwin CVS Repository.

Apple announced the availability of the Darwin 6.6 source code, corresponding to Mac OS X 10.2.6.

MacNN reports that the Darwin team today posted the Darwin 6.5 source code, corresponding to Mac OS X 10.2.5. "Darwin 6.5 is what we call an 'on-cycle' source-code release, where the corresponding Darwin source is made available soon after a new release of Mac OS X to customers." Several projects (e.g., gcc, gdb, CUPS, Rendezvous) will continue to do 'off-cycle' releases, according to the developer, whereby the source code is updated more frequently than our commercial releases.

Because of violations of the BSD license the MicroBSD project has been completely removed from the internet, and all MicroBSD users are asked to remove it from their computers.

The GNU-Darwin project is now considered stable and it has reached 1.0 status (it seems that the latest beta will be marked as 1.0). Download from here, packages, ports.

GNU-Darwin will no longer 'support or distribute any software which links to proprietary libraries, and that includes Cocoa, Carbon, CoreAudio, etc.' They will also be putting PPC collections into 'maintenance mode' and moving all operations to x86. Read the story at MacSlash.

As stated in the previous OSNews article our project, Yamit, is trying to address some shortcomings of Mach that are usually results of insufficient tuning (sometimes caused by the fact that code comes from the 80's).

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.

The OpenDarwin cvs has been updated with the latest xnu sources. The Tag for the branch corresponding to OpenDarwin is OD_APPLE_10_2. Information on getting the sources is available here while you can report bugs here.

"Well, I've been reading a little about MicroBSD. So I decided to quickly give it a try. This article talks about installing MicroBSD, what features make it special, troubles and successes I encountered, and the beauty of the BSD license. So I retrieved the MicroBSD 0.5 mini ISO image and burned a CD." Read it at BSDNewsLetter.

Yamit is a microkernel, developed under a BSD compatible license. Mentioned capabilities are a thread-aware kernel and multiprocessor support (including both tight SMP and loose - NUMA architectures). The project is largely based on the Mach microkernel that was being designed for many years by CMU and OSF.

From DaemonNews.org: "The goal of the OpenDarwin project is to provide a binary compatible development environment for Mac OS X. The OpenDarwin project is based on the latest sources available from the Darwin project at Apple Computer. One of the key aspects of the project is to enable interested Mac OS X and Darwin developers to be able to retrieve, modify, build, and distribute operating system changes. It also seems Jordan Hubbard is a member of the OpenDarwin Core Team, recently resigning from the FreeBSD Core Team."

Wind River Systems announced the release of version 4.3 of BSD/OS, the company's commercial UNIX-based operating system, and detailed roadmap plans for the product. Version 4.3 of BSD/OS is available now. Future releases of the operating system will target server appliances, security and traffic management appliances, network attached storage (NAS) devices, and telecom application processing blades as part of Wind River's strategy to provide end-to-end development platforms across the entire spectrum of original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and embedded market segments.

"BSD is now three times as popular on the desktop than Linux, Apple's Ernest Parbakar told attendees at the annual USENIX BSD Conference here yesterday. That's thanks to Mac OS X, of course, which is a BSD-based Unix (although much of this remains hidden). Read the rest of the story at TheRegister. Our Take: This is definetely true for the desktop where Linux holds less than 1% (and Apple a bit less than 3% according to Oct 2001 stats), but that is certainly not true for the server market, where Linux holds around 25%.