For a long time, I've been under the impression, largely from friends who have been running Macintoshes for ages, that OS-X was based on one of the three BSD forks - that essentially it was a *BSD with an Apple window manager/desktop environment, and with the kernel (and other programs) locked to the Trusted Program Module (TPM).
Comments from some of you lately led me to do some research. It appears that, at least on the internet, current documentation agrees that OS-X is based on Openstep, which evolved from NeXTSTEP, which was derived from 4.4 BSD (pre-fork?) and the Mach OS.
It's funny how knowledge like this can evolve on the web. What gets collated, analyzed, and archived becomes the truth. What was known to be true at the time gets forgotten. Mode Emulators become Modulator/Demodulators. Other acronyms drift.
They hacked the Mac OS X to run on Intel hardware. I'm not talking about them changing to an Intel architecture. While I'm not sure of the particulars, I heard that it's only a few minor code adjustments to get the OS to run on Intel hardware. If I remember right, it's a BIOS checking thing. If it's not the Mac BIOS, it won't install or run?
On 5/16/07, Jonathan Hutchins hutchins@tarcanfel.org wrote:
For a long time, I've been under the impression, largely from friends who have been running Macintoshes for ages, that OS-X was based on one of the three BSD forks - that essentially it was a *BSD with an Apple window manager/desktop environment, and with the kernel (and other programs) locked to the Trusted Program Module (TPM).
Comments from some of you lately led me to do some research. It appears that, at least on the internet, current documentation agrees that OS-X is based on Openstep, which evolved from NeXTSTEP, which was derived from 4.4 BSD (pre-fork?) and the Mach OS.
It's funny how knowledge like this can evolve on the web. What gets collated, analyzed, and archived becomes the truth. What was known to be true at the time gets forgotten. Mode Emulators become Modulator/Demodulators. Other acronyms drift. _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list Kclug@kclug.org http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug
The Intel Macs didn't originally ship with any form of BIOS, and the newer ones only have a BIOS compatibility module in the EFI system. The only reason they added the BIOS mod was so geeks could dual-boot OSX with more traditional x86 OSes.
The Intel version of OSX wont boot on anything but specialized EFI systems. People have done hacking to both OSX and EFI implementations to get OSX running on non-standard hardware. At least one fellow managed to get OSX to run mostly stable on a hacked Dell laptop. As far as I know, there are no working EFI implementations that aren't based on an Intel chip (Intel did make EFI after all), and so the system must be Intel based to run OSX, regardless of if its Mac hardware or not.
Not sure what exactly this has to do with the original post, but then again I have yet to determine what the goal of the original post was...
~Bradley Hook
RtX wrote:
They hacked the Mac OS X to run on Intel hardware. I'm not talking about them changing to an Intel architecture. While I'm not sure of the particulars, I heard that it's only a few minor code adjustments to get the OS to run on Intel hardware. If I remember right, it's a BIOS checking thing. If it's not the Mac BIOS, it won't install or run?
On 5/16/07, Jonathan Hutchins hutchins@tarcanfel.org wrote:
For a long time, I've been under the impression, largely from friends who have been running Macintoshes for ages, that OS-X was based on one of the three BSD forks - that essentially it was a *BSD with an Apple window manager/desktop environment, and with the kernel (and other programs) locked to the Trusted Program Module (TPM).
Comments from some of you lately led me to do some research. It appears that, at least on the internet, current documentation agrees that OS-X is based on Openstep, which evolved from NeXTSTEP, which was derived from 4.4 BSD (pre-fork?) and the Mach OS.
It's funny how knowledge like this can evolve on the web. What gets collated, analyzed, and archived becomes the truth. What was known to be true at the time gets forgotten. Mode Emulators become Modulator/Demodulators. Other acronyms drift. _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list Kclug@kclug.org http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug
Kclug mailing list Kclug@kclug.org http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug
What happened to the Darwin port for regular BIOS-based x86 PCs? In theory, one should be able to replace the OSX kernel with that to get a clean system, Intel or not...
On 5/16/07, RtX riverty@gmail.com wrote:
They hacked the Mac OS X to run on Intel hardware. I'm not talking about them changing to an Intel architecture. While I'm not sure of the particulars, I heard that it's only a few minor code adjustments to get the OS to run on Intel hardware. If I remember right, it's a BIOS checking thing. If it's not the Mac BIOS, it won't install or run?
They didn't have to hack it to run on Intel hardware. NeXTSTEP had run on Intel hardware since 1993, before Apple bought NeXT. While OS X was under development there were x86 machines in the labs that ran builds of every OS X release. Every OS X that hit the market for PPC was compiled and run internally by Apple for x86 as well. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple after the NeXT buyout he used an x86 machine running OPENSTEP (and presumably the developing OS X) as his personal machine. x86 support at Apple was no secret, but it wasn't really public. Apple uses both EFI and the TPM to check for valid hardware before allowing OS X to install or boot on x86.
And the history of OS X/NeXTSTEP above is pretty much correct. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mac_OS_X
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system%29 http://developer.apple.com/opensource/index.html
Most of my knowledge of Apple internal working on OS X stem from what has been posted by a former Apple employee who worked there through much of this transition. He left just before Apple really got the Mac mini off the conceptual drawing boards.
Jon.
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Bradley Hook -
Jon Pruente -
Jonathan Hutchins -
Luke -Jr -
RtX