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Crowding out OpenBSDCrowding out OpenBSDPosted Nov 15, 2012 16:49 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333)In reply to: Crowding out OpenBSD by karim Parent article: Crowding out OpenBSD
The only irony is that the one Linux system that is widely successful in the consumer-facing personal computer market is the one that choose to completely abandoned all pretense of POSIX compatibility and traditional linux-distribution approach to packaging software and went with a dedicated Java-based userland.
This pretty much breaks all the rules that most of the *nix pundents on LWN and most other forums consider core requirements for success.
The biggest problem faced by Gnome and other folks if they want to remain compatible with the BSDs and Solaris and be able achieve their goals pretty much means writing their own entire OS that runs in a abstraction layer on top of a POSIX API that runs with enough privileges to aggressively bypass everything the BSD/Solaris kernel does.
That means having their own graphics drivers, own hardware discovery, own INIT system that runs on top of the existing init system, etc etc. All of it isolated and restricted from anything else that may happen on the OS.
It would be far easier and cleaner approach to port OpenBSD to be a Xen host and run Linux/Gnome desktop on top of that.
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POSIX compliance Posted Nov 22, 2012 10:54 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] On the other hand, the one BSD system that is widely successful is fully POSIX compliant: Mac OS X.
POSIX compliance Posted Nov 23, 2012 11:36 UTC (Fri) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
And they did that by, for example, declaring that if you want to use any of OS X's unique features then you can't also use fork(2): http://mail.scipy.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/2012-Aug...
Not really a great argument for prioritizing POSIX, sadly.
POSIX compliance Posted Nov 23, 2012 11:38 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Apparently there are many hidden ironies in this POSIX business, not just one.
POSIX compliance Posted Nov 23, 2012 13:32 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
You CAN use fork(2) in OS X. You just can't use fork _and_ Cocoa GUI at the same time.
That's not different from Linux and X11.
POSIX compliance Posted Nov 23, 2012 14:25 UTC (Fri) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
The difference is that (1) it's officially unsupported to use *any* Apple-written library that is not part of POSIX in a program which also uses fork, (2) since Apple considers this NOTABUG, the APIs provide no way to work around the problems.
With X11, using fork is fine -- you just have to make sure that you only use that connection in one of the children. The bug report I linked to is Apple explaining that you cannot use their *linear algebra library* (which implements the standard, cross-platform BLAS interfaces) on both sides of a fork, and that the only solution is to use a different linear algebra library.
[NB I don't use OS X or really care about it either way, except that these things are annoying to work around.]
POSIX compliance Posted Nov 23, 2012 14:35 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Apple is just conservative. It's easier to say "it doesn't work" then to deal with developers using something that works only accidentally.
In particular, important parts of OS X are fork-safe. Moreover, OS X has support for code confinement and process isolation.
POSIX compliance Posted Nov 23, 2012 21:39 UTC (Fri) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]
How much of BSD there's in in Apple's iOS?
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