soeren says » Blog Archive

Naysayers

August 8th, 2006

There were many who felt that Apple was never going to open up XNU again.

There were those who decided it was time to close down OpenDarwin, and that it wasn’t worth waiting for announcements during WWDC (which I’ve always felt was really weird, and I wasn’t alone with that notion).

All in all, a fair share of developers had completely lost faith in the Darwin project.

Maybe Apple just proved them all wrong. Mac OS Forge has WordPress, Subversion and Trac and hosts five interesting projects.

Whether interaction with Apple’s engineers will finally improve has yet to be seen. But if the WebKit site opened last year wasn’t proof enough that Apple “really means it” about open source, maybe Mac OS Forge finally is.

Apparently the “XNU on Intel has certain closed-source third-party components that can’t be released, hence the delay” theory was dead-on. Those were now moved into kernel extensions, which resolves the issue of having XNU itself open-source.

Sometimes you gotta have a little more faith in people.

Posted in Mac, Programming, Software

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Others' Thoughts

# moiety
Comment on August 8th, 2006 at 4:07 pm

Did the “secret features turning into extensions” feature already trickle down through Software Update, or will this be something in 10.4.8?

# chucker
Comment on August 8th, 2006 at 4:45 pm

No, and it may not be in 10.4.8 either, but MacOSForge has extensive instructions on installing this patch (i.e., “secret features turning into extensions”) yourself (with the warning that you will not be able to roll back to the standard, closed-source XNU of 10.4.7).

In other words, Intel XNU for 10.4.7 is available right here, right now. I haven’t installed it and don’t know anyone who tried, but I imagine it’s no big task.

# Capella
Comment on August 8th, 2006 at 7:18 pm

For the idiots- what’s XNU?

# chucker
Comment on August 8th, 2006 at 10:26 pm

It’s the name for Mac OS X’s and Darwin’s kernel. XNU is a bit of a complicated beast; a mixture of multiple third-party (Mach, BSD and others) and proprietary (I/O Registry and others) technologies.

Wikipedia has a page, as does Amit Singh. Highly technical stuff though.

(It’s the very, very lowest-end piece of technology that keeps OS X running, unless you count hardware and firmware.)

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