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Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)Posted Sep 25, 2008 20:23 UTC (Thu) by salimma (subscriber, #34460)In reply to: Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times) by ncm Parent article: Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)
Um, the problem with OS X's Darwin underpinnings is not the BSD userland. It's that they use a not-terribly-efficient microkernel (Mach).
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Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times) Posted Sep 25, 2008 20:46 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> microkernel
They don't use a Microkernel. :)
They use code _from_ a Microkernel, but that's about it.. It's sort of like a mash-up of Mach and a BSD kernel (FreeBSD, I think) with Mach-derived controlling part of the kernel's task and message-passes it to the BSD-derived side for other operations.
http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/arch_xnu.html
At best it can be described as a 'Hybrid Microkernel' since it does do some message passing stuff. Another famous 'hybrid microkernel' would be Microsoft's NT kernel. It started early in life as a microkernel design.
The kernel design may contribute to it, but there are a ton of little things about OS X that tell me that Apple isn't really concerned about performance very much. They create a slick interface and make things 'fast enough', which is perfectly fine for what the OS is designed for.
Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times) Posted Sep 25, 2008 21:25 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
Yes, the sort-of use Mach-under-BSD, but they could just as easily drop it. Once laptops have 32-core processors, and somebody figures out a way to make them do something that enough people think they want, Apple will drop it like a stone.
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