Mac Closes OS X kernel from Open Source | The Coffeehouse

zzzzz

link to acticle

Manip

And?

Rossj

The number of people actually using this wasn't exactly huge, although it has always compiled on x86.

rhm

yeh, mouth breather Smiley

martin_lovick

looks like someone just threw their toys out the cot

Xaero_Vincent

OS X's kernel sucks!

It's based on Mach and is inefficent and slow. Apple needs to move to the FreeBSD 6.x kernel for 10.5 Leopard and stop playing games.

Regards,
Vincent

Manip

Xaero_Vincent wrote:

OS X's kernel sucks!

It's based on Mach and is inefficent and slow. Apple needs to move to the FreeBSD 6.x kernel for 10.5 Leopard and stop playing games.

Regards,
Vincent

Interesting. Can you back up any of it?

Cairo

Xaero_Vincent wrote:

Manip wrote:
Interesting. Can you back up any of it?

http://sekhon.berkeley.edu/macosx/intel.html

Edit: Actually its there Memory Management that sucks. They should use the FreeBSD kernel anyway though since they use the userland tools.

Things are not always as they seem:
http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/archives/2006/05/16/36/

Xaero_Vincent

Manip wrote:

Interesting. Can you back up any of it?

http://sekhon.berkeley.edu/macosx/intel.html

Edit: Actually its the Memory Management that sucks. However they should use the FreeBSD kernel anyway since they use the userland tools and because its more secure.

I think Apple decided to use the Mach (XNU) kernel because at that time, the FreeBSD's 5 kernel did not support preemptive multitasking and things.

Regards,
Vincent

Manip

Xaero_Vincent wrote:

they should use the FreeBSD kernel anyway since they use the userland tools and because its more secure.

Can you prove that BSD is more secure?

Xaero_Vincent

Manip wrote:

Can you prove that BSD is more secure?

"TrustedBSD MAC Framework extensible kernel security, which allows developers to customize the operating system security model for specific environments, from creating hardening policies to deploying mandatory labeled confidentiality of integrity policies. Sample seucrity policies include Multi-Level Security (MLS), and Biba Integrity Protection. Third party modules include SEBSD, a FLASK-based implementation of Type Enforcement."

http://www.freebsd.org/features.html

Does XNU have MAC kernels module like TrustedBSD and SELinux?

Regards,
Vincent

Manip

No.

But that really doesn't prove anything. I would need unbiased tests to be preformed on both platforms in order to evaluation which, if either, is more secure. Do you have that data?

Xaero_Vincent

Well if XNU doesnt have built in support for Mandatory Access Control policies than wouldnt it be at a security disadvantage?

But I'll say this... SELinux isnt user friendly and creating policies is painful from what I've read. AppArmor is superior in many respects, and gives SUSE an advantage. I think Windows has MAC features too though I havent done my research. I dont know how complex TrustedBSD is to use, but probably not simple too.

If end users just use the default policies or disable MAC, because its too difficult to use, then they wont be as secure and buffer overrun bugs with software could become a security vulnerability.

Regards,
Vincent

Tom Servo

Xaero_Vincent wrote:

I think Apple decided to use the Mach (XNU) kernel because at that time, the FreeBSD's 5 kernel did not support preemptive multitasking and things.

It always supported preemptive multitasking.

Erisan

From Apple mailing list:
Re: [Fed-Talk] Apple [may not open] OS X Kernel for Intel

spoofnozzle

Looks like another example of personal opinion and rumour mongering, being labelled as 'journalism'.

The are plenty of these blogs masquerading as 'News' sites... 'The Inquirer' for example.

Another_Darren

Who cares? So it's closed, so is Microsofts. So they are protecting themselves from pirates, so are Microsoft.

This site in the last two days looks more like a MS campaign against Apple than a community site.

How some news on new technology or great software you found?