Talk:Darwin (operating system)

message: "Some of the benefits of this choice of kernel are the Mach-O binary format, which allows a single executable file (including the kernel itself) to support multiple CPU architectures, and the mature support for symmetric multiprocessing in Mach." - this is incorrect.  The kernel architecture is completely orthogonal to the use of "fat binaries".  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.10.5.236 (talk) 19:50, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure what "this choice of kernel" meant, but merely choosing something that uses Mach code didn't give it fat binaries; NeXT added them to their kernel - they weren't an inherent Mach-ism - so I removed that item.  For that matter, the "mature support for symmetric multiprocessing in Mach" didn't magically make XNU a finely-threaded kernel - a lot of work, starting in, as I remember, Tiger, was done to get rid of the somewhat coarse threading (the "funnels") originally used - so I got rid of that bit as well. Guy Harris (talk) 19:59, 20 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: General correction

message: ...is NOT an operating system.  It is a project to package software to run on Mac OS X or Darwin, similar to DarwinPorts or Fink.  Again, it is NOT an operating system. AlistairMcMillan 12:15, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm currently discussing this on the GNU-Darwin talk page, but I don't see how it can be discounted as an operating system, or a distro of Darwin. In the GNU-Darwin FAQs, it is referred to as both a distribution and an operating system. – Mipadi 16:45, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: GNU-Darwin...

message: I learned about Darwin since I'm doing streaming video and I found the Darwin Streaming Server. It has nothing to do with the kernel/OS. Is Darwin a "Sourceforge" style site or incubator for its open source projects? --Migs 08:57, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Darwin is not a website, OpenDarwin.org is. They just used the name Darwin on a couple of open source projects. AlistairMcMillan 09:59, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Apple's SourceForge is Mac OS Forge, although that's not where all of Apple's open source is hosted; Mac OS Forge is for the stuff that's done at Apple with an intent to open development to third parties (so, for example, they may have a version control system repository open), the LLVM Web site has LLVM (which started as a University of Illinois project) and LLVM-related projects (such as clang), and other stuff that's just done as a tarball dump is at opensource.apple.com. Guy Harris (talk) 20:20, 20 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is Darwin Apple's "Sourceforge?" 

message: The article doesn't mention anywhere that Darwin is built on the Mach microkernel.  I would like to add this, but I don't know if it is based on normal Mach or GNU Mach.  Can someone more informed mention this? Gronky 00:45, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: In the sidebar it does mention the kernel, which is actually XNU, not Mach. – Mipadi 00:52, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  As Mipadi just said, the kernel is called XNU, but XNU is partially built on Mach. They probably used the original Mach kernel, and definitely not GNU Mach. If they had used GNU Mach, Apple would be bound to the General Public License for their releases, but they release their code under the GPL-incompatible APSL. --Unsound 05:52, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

text: It now mentions that it's based on Mach 3 (and has done so for a while). Guy Harris (talk) 20:27, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

text: The paragraph below the Darwin release table indicates what Darwin version number is used for any given Mac OS X release number. Guy Harris (talk) 20:27, 20 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Which mach? 

message: Is it appropriate to list Darwin 8.8.2 and Darwin 8.9 under the ‘Releases’ section when there aren't actually any public releases beyond 8.8.1? Also, given that Leopard's version of Darwin also isn't publicly available, is it similarly appropriate to list 9.4 as the current ‘Preview’ release? To my knowledge, Apple doesn't make the Darwin components available to anybody (including ADC Premier members) until after the retail OS has been released. I don't think they shouldn't be mentioned, by any means, but it's probably worth differentiating between the releases that you can actually get freely and the versions of the OS that exist only within Apple. Nevalicori 15:18, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Okay, Darwin 8.9 has been released (yesterday, I believe), which would make its release date the 18th April 2007, in contrast to the Mac OS X 10.4.9 release date currently shown. I'm loathed to change the page, though, if it breaks continuity—are past release dates all listed as the corresponding Mac OS X release date, or are any of them actual Darwin releases? Nevalicori 12:06, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Releases 

message: I was curious about Darwin and AppleFileServer, but the article doesn't mention it. Is AppleFileServer included in Darwin? If AppleFileServer is a part of the open source Darwin, are there any differences between the AppleFileServer included with Darwin and the binaries included in Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server? Again, just curious, but perhaps this could be included in the article too. Indexheavy 07:23, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: AppleFileServer is, as its man page states, the Apple Filing Protocol server; it is not open-source, so it's not part of Darwin. Guy Harris (talk) 20:29, 20 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  AppleFileServer 

message: The intro said it was developed by Apple and released by Apple and maintained by Apple, but IIRC, Apple just took the FreeBSD code, made some changes, release what was convenient (what they wanted others to maintain) and kept the nice stuff proprietary, and the maintenance mostly consists of integrating the code which is still being written by the FreeBSD devs.
I've updated the intro to be a half-way between what it used to say and what I think it should say (because my memory isn't clear and I don't have time to research the history right now). --Gronky 11:36, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: YDRC.  The XNU kernel, for example, isn't just the FreeBSD kernel plus "some changes"; the stuff under the osfmk and iokit directories, for example, is not from FreeBSD at all, and a lot of the stuff under the bsd directory is from Apple (the VFS layer was redone in Tiger, including the new authentication code).  Libc does incorporate a lot of stuff from FreeBSD, but the memory allocator isn't from FreeBSD, nor is any of the getXXbyYY code.  A lot of the Darwin code does come from various non-Apple free software projects - but not all of it does, and a lot of the important stuff doesn't.  (Some of it comes from Apple free software projects, e.g. Directory Services, which is in the Darwin source, and launchd.) Guy Harris 23:22, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, I agree the current version is certainly better. --Gronky 12:30, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Who wrote it? 

message: Just to let you know. The purpose of selecting an article is both to point readers to the article and to highlight it to potential contributors. It will remain on the portal for a week or so. The previous selected article was Cygnus Solutions, probably the first big free software business.
For other interesting free software articles, you can take a look at the archive of PFs selectees. --Gronky 16:33, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Time to move on.  The new selectee is free software licences - a general article about the requirements and differences in FS licences. --Gronky (talk) 14:27, 20 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Portal:Free software]]: Darwin is now the selected article 

message: "Darwin is built around XNU, a hybrid kernel that combines the Mach 3 microkernel".
Isn't it supposed to be version 2.5???  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 189.146.124.117 (talk) 06:44, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The link provided at the end of that paragraph goes to Apple's open source web site, which says Mach 3. NeXTSTEP and Rhapsody used Mach 2.5, but presumably, Apple updated it to Mach 3 by the time it was forked into Darwin/OS X. --typhoon (talk) 01:34, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mach version 

message: This section is kind of a mess—with all the different versions of OS X these days (Darwin's weird, inconsistent versioning history doesn't help)—and not that interesting besides (all the Mac OS X point-point releases border on minutiae). I've boldly changed it up a bit by limiting it to major releases (1.0, 1.2 ... 1.4, 6.0 ... 9.0) and changing it to a table like the Ubuntu Linux page used to that shows the release version, release date, corresponding OS X versions, and a Features and Changes column that shows what's new in each release (so far, only for the last two releases, but I'll try to research the others).
I removed the "See also" link to Étoilé because, while interesting, I don't know what it has to do with Darwin (it's appropriate for the GNUstep page, though).
--typhoon (talk) 19:29, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Release history table 

message: I merged the OpenDarwin page into this page. Its page was pretty short because there wasn't a whole lot to say about the project (it was founded, it was shut down), and it was unlikely to ever get much bigger since the project has been dead for two years. Feel free to tell me if you don't like the change, though. --typhoon (talk) 20:44, 2 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  OpenDarwin 

message: The image :Image:Hexley.png is used in this article under a claim of fair use, but it does not have an adequate explanation for why it meets the requirements for such images when used here.  In particular, for each page the image is used on, it must have an explanation linking to that page which explains why it needs to be used on that page.  Please check
:* That there is a non-free use rationale on the image's description page for the use in this article.
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thread_title: Image copyright problem with Image:Hexley.png

message: Please see
http://www.hexley.com/license.html
I think the picture should be reinstated.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.244.185.247 (talk) 14:14, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Statement on the Use of the Hexley Darwin Mascot Figure

message: The "official" darwin OS, as distributed by apple on their site, is not possible to compile, let alone run...I think it should me mentioned in the article at least. --78.128.199.9 (talk) 20:29, 25 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Darwin is impossible to compile 

message: How about a bit on the file system hierarchy ? (/Users instead of /home, etc.) --Jerome Potts (talk) 18:57, 27 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Darwin has /home as of Darwin 9.0; it has the same /home that Solaris does, as long as you have an auto_home automounter map.  /home is, on any system with a Solaris-compatible automounter, a place where user home directories get automounted; the actual home directory doesn't necessarily live under /home on the machine on whose disks is resides.  There is no standard UN*X-wide convention for local home directories; /Users happens to be the Mac OS X convention.  The rest of the file system hierarchy is a combination of a fairly standard BSD hierarchy plus, for the Apple-specific stuff, things under /System and /Library. Guy Harris (talk) 20:36, 20 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  The file system 

message: I don't know, but the article probably should be edited for the upcoming iPad. We don't have any confirmation, but iPad runs iPhone OS based on Darwin? ctxppc on http://www.ctxppc.me (talk) 21:12, 28 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, but it's now called "iOS" because it runs on more than just iPhones.  The article now reflects that. Guy Harris (talk) 20:37, 20 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  iPhone OS & iPad 

message: It seems that darwin is no longer open source. it is the reason OpenDarwin shut down. also:  http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=14663. The link to the source at the bottom of the page is three years old IRWolfie- (talk) 14:30, 18 December 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: No, it's still open-source.  It took a little while for Apple to put the x86 code up, but they did. It continues to be there, as of Mac OS X 10.7.2 (the most recent release). Guy Harris (talk) 20:42, 20 January 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Current Darwin cannot be described as an Open Source operating system. Try to build it. You will find (as the PureDarwin team did) that many key components are missing, and the released Open Source projects have many dependencies on private APIs that make those projects difficult if not impossible to rebuild, even on a functional macOS system. Also, Apple does not even refer to the existence of an open source Darwin operating system on their Open Source website anymore——just an (incomplete) collection of macOS Open Source projects Tkmcinto (talk) 23:16, 26 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Darwin not Open Source 

message: The version numbers in the infobox are rather out-of-date, if the intent is to give the version numbers of the Darwin atop which, say, the latest supported OS X release (11.0.0) is based and atop which the latest released build of the next OS X major release (if any; currently, there's nothing post-Mountain Lion announced).  If that is the intent, it raises the question of what to do about iOS - have separate "latest stable release" and "latest unstable release" items for OS X and iOS? Guy Harris (talk) 19:42, 19 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Version numbers in the infobox 

message: Should Mavericks be added to the table for Darwin 13.0.0 or should we wait for a public release? Running `uname` in Mavericks confirms the usage of Darwin 13.0.0. Currently the only OS, according to the page, using 13 is iOS 6, but OS X 10.9 does as well.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kylalak (talk • contribs) 23:05, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  OS X Mavericks 

message: iOS 7's final code is out for devs, it comes out for everyone in a few days which uses Darwin 14.0, Mavericks comes out later this year and it uses Darwin 13.0, how should the OS's be put in the infobox, and would it be inappropriate to put Darwin 14.0 as the latest version, possibly as the latest beta version?
Also, can we have something that explains why the iOS version has a higher version number? Bumblebritches57 (talk) 19:47, 14 September 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I just found an article that explains why iOS's version of darwin is higher if anyone wants to include it, and of course thinks that it fits Wikipedia standards for sources and such, I'm not very familiar with that, and I don't want to make a big mistake or anything. Here's the url: http://theiphonewiki.com/wiki/Kernel#Versions Bumblebritches57 (talk) 20:26, 14 September 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  It's an article that speculates on why iOS's version of Darwin is higher. Whether the speculation is correct is another matter. Guy Harris (talk) 21:33, 14 September 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Infobox 

message: It looks like PureDarwin is a dead project, or at least comatose. The last update on their site is from December of 2012.
sydbarrett74 (talk) 15:54, 24 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: PureDarwin dead?

message: "The point release number in the Darwin version is always the same as the second point number in the macOS version."
The last version in the table directly contradicts that, where Darwin 16.3.0 is macOS Sierra 12.2.  Similarly, the current version of macOS 12.3 reports a Darwin version of 16.4.0.
Stacecom (talk) 22:49, 9 March 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Removed. Guy Harris (talk) 03:14, 10 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Untrue statement on version numbers 

message: The article currently says:
:The hybrid kernel design provides the flexibility of a microkernel and the performance of a monolithic kernel.
The citation says:
:The core of any operating system is its kernel. Though OS X shares much of its underlying architecture with BSD, the OS X kernel, known as XNU, differs significantly. XNU is based on the Mach microkernel design, but it also incorporates BSD features. It is not technically a microkernel implementation, but still has many of the benefits of a microkernel, such as Mach interprocess communication mechanisms and a relatively clean API separation between various parts of the kernel.
:Why is it designed like this? With pure Mach, the core parts of the operating system are user space processes. This gives you flexibility, but also slows things down because of message passing performance between Mach and the layers built on top of it. To regain that performance, BSD functionality has been incorporated in the kernel alongside Mach. The result is that the kernel combines the strengths of Mach with the strengths of BSD.
which doesn't seem to clearly indicate that they believe that the "flexibility" remains after the BSD functionality was built top Mach in kernel space.  It speaks of "the strengths of Mach", but that might just refer to those "benefits of a microkernel" that were given in the first paragraph.  You don't have the "flexibility" of building userland servers for file systems, network protocols, etc. as a result of the Mach base; file systems and network protocols live in the BSD part of the kernel, which is pretty monolithic-looking.  (In macOS, you could get the flexibility of building userland servers for file systems, for example, by using FUSE, but that's far from unique to macOS.  If any system with FUSE is a "hybrid kernel", I'd say Linus Torvalds is right - "hybrid kernel" is "just marketing".)
(And, yes, I've worked on code that runs in kernel space that communicates with a userland server via Mach messages, but that was just choosing, when porting autofs, to use an existing communications mechanism as a replacement for the ONC RPC transport in Solaris, rather than creating a full-blown general ONC RPC layer - the NFS client and server in macOS were based on Rick Macklem's BSD code with its specialized hand-written ONC RPC implementation.  It wasn't an example of the Wonderful Flexibility of XNU being a "hybrid kernel".  The Sun autofs is supported on several OSes with a variety of mechanisms used to communicate between the autofs VFS in the kernel and automountd in usewrland, so citing Darwin autofs as an example of the flexibility of a hybrid kernel would make any system using it a system with a hybrid kernel.
I'm also not entirely convinced that the "relatively clean API separation between various parts of the kernel" is necessarily much cleaner than in other UN*Xes.) Guy Harris (talk) 23:48, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: In this edit, a citation was provided for the "flexibility of a microkernel" claim, but the paper doesn't speak much about hybrid kernels other than discussing Mach and Windows NT in a few paragraphs and saying that, in both cases, they ended up with a system wherein a lot of functionality was moved back to the kernel. Guy Harris (talk) 21:18, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  "flexibility of a microkernel" 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: There seems to be a sudden insistence on removing the table of versions from this article. This table was added in 2005 and has at no point between then and now has it been considered to be contentious or not in keeping with Wikipedia's content policies. The only justification provided is a reference to WP:NOTCHANGELOG, which reads "Use reliable third-party (not self-published or official) sources in articles dealing with software updates to describe the versions listed or discussed in the article. Common sense must be applied with regard to the level of detail to be included."  Thing is, there already were reliable third-party sources being used (e.g. John Siracusa), albeit not with complete consistency, but finding more shouldn't be a problem. Darwin the second most widely-used open-source kernel in the world, how hard could that be?
Here's the thing though -- this underlying issue here has nothing to do with Darwin. The inclusion and presentation of software history has been an ongoing point of contention on Wikipedia for years, including attempts to delete articles like PlayStation 4 system software that resulted in no consensus to delete.  This isn't a new problem, and I think it's because WP:NOT's wording leaves too much to interpretation. If different editors can read the same policy and end up wanting to do radically different things, then that's a problem with the policy, not the editors per se.  Warren -talk- 11:05, 26 December 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Version history does not have any place in an encyclopedia as its place is in a manual or FAQ which violates  WP:NOTFAQ and WP:NOTMANUAL along with WP:CHANGELOG. Hagennos (talk) 17:40, 27 December 2017 (UTC)
replies: text:  If you're going to respond to something on Wikipedia, could you please do the bare fucking minimum and read it first? The policy you're claiming covers this issue is literally quoted in my post. Also, WP:NOTMANUAL doesn't apply, as that is for "how-to" content and WP:NOTFAQ is for "question-and-answer" content. Software version histories is neither of these things.  You know this, and yet you argue.  Be smarter than that.  Warren -talk- 01:23, 28 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Version history removal 

message: Addition of a list of Release history does not provide any addition information to the readers of the article and bloats the page content.  This should be in the software documentation which Wikipedia is not and violates WP:CHANGELOG, WP:NOTMANUAL, WP:NOTGUIDE. Hagennos (talk) 18:52, 2 January 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: So far you've failed to explain why or how NOTMANUAL applies here. Everyone else understands that particular rule to be about "how-to guides".  Are you choosing to ignore this fact on purpose?  Warren -talk- 22:58, 2 January 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: My broader feelings on this matter do not have any bearing on our policies on sourcing and weight.  However, since you asked: in my experience, it is sometimes the case on Wikipedia that information is presented in a table as a way of covering for a lack of sourcing and encyclopedic interest.  There are also lots of places on WP where lists are deployed sensibly.  Unfortunately, this situation is clearly in the former category.  --JBL (talk) 13:17, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
thread_title: RfC About inclusion of Version/Release History

message: The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:
* 
Participate in the deletion discussion at the . —Community Tech bot (talk) 10:39, 25 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion 

message: The page here says 21.5, while the system description page of a site my computer has logged into says that my Mac's kernel is "Darwin 22.1.0". This seems to contradict your claim, but I may be mistaken and am trying to find more definite confirmation elsewhere... ELSchissel (talk) 17:57, 31 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is the latest release 21.5 as stated or 22.1? 

message: The reference to the DarwinBSD project was apparently added on 
7 February 2023‎.
The URL http://darwinbsd.tk/ appears to be either dead or temporarily down, currently returning a 502 Bad Gateway response. The Wayback Machine has captures for this site between December 1, 2021 and April 7, 2023. From those captures, it appears that darwinbsd.tk is merely an alias for https://freeshell.de/~betounix/darwinbsd/index.html. The #darwinbsd Libera.Chat channel referenced from that page was created on 6/17/2021 and appears to have no content, except a link to darwinbsd.tk. The only nontrivial information on the page mirrors the content of an old SourceForge project by the same user (betounix) with no activity other than an old Darwin ISO uploaded in 2013: https://sourceforge.net/projects/darwinbsd/. All other internal links on the page are mailto URLs.
I would suggest that this reference should be removed, as there does not appear to be anything of significance available to readers. Tkmcinto (talk) 02:34, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is the DarwinBSD project legitimate? Notable enough to be listed here?