[olug] Fw: 5.0 project list ("Help Wanted")

[Phil Brutsche]

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far way, someone said...

> I thought Apple's Darwin (Core of Mac OS X) was initially based on netbsd.

Nope.  A lot of people get the Darwin, FreeBSD and NetBSD relationship
messed up.

Darwin is NeXTStep - based on the Mach microkernel - ported to PPC and the
GUI stripped off.

OSX is Darwin with that fancy Aqua GUI thingy.

They happened to use NetBSD user-level utilities and features (like the
packet filtering code) from the FreeBSD kernel, and even some user-level
bits from Linux (dpkg, for one).

> Isn't it supposed to be migrating to freebsd.

Nope.  It would suck if it did, too.  FreeBSD has *a lot* of Intelisms in
it.  OSX has better support for PCI Macs *now* than FreeBSD will a year
from now.

Apple could just as easily hired Jason Thorpe (one of the head NetBSD
hackers).

> So hopefully, support for PowerPC is being supported by Apple in some
> capacity, I believe they recently hired the main hacker for the
> freebsd project.

They hired him to work on OSX stuff, not to port FreeBSD to PPC.

> Given that it does make me scratch my head on why they feel the need
> to support UltraSparc (note I like sun's architecture but I have only
> run Solaris on it).

And should FreeBSD join Linux & NetBSD in having marginal support for the
architecture, but be even slower and having even worse hardware support?

Solaris is, has been, and will continue to be the best operating system
available for SPARCs.

-- 

Phil


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