saved.netlify.app

Dengue outbreaks in Divinopolis, south-eastern Brazil and the geographic and climatic distribution of Aedes albopictus and Aedes aegypti in 2011–2012. Oct 17, 2019  The vast majority of kernel panics are due to incompatible 3rd party kernel extensions and hardware failures. Apple isn't going to lift a finger to solve either one. All that will happen is that the OP will sit on their hands and do nothing while panics continue to pile up and/or their warranty expires.

• Library Kernel Machine
• Library Kernel32 Methods
• Intel Math Kernel Library Mac
• Library Kernel Mac Os

1. Sep 28, 2017  XNU kernel is part of the Darwin operating system for use in OS X and iOS operating systems. XNU is an acronym for XNU is Not Unix. XNU is a hybrid kernel combining the Mach kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University with components.
2. Oct 04, 2015  Oh wow! That allowed me to boot! Thank you very much. However, it was not a total fix.Upon getting past that, I got to the Clover screen and was prompted to boot from my USB.

The lowest layer of OS X includes the kernel, drivers, and BSD portions of the system and is based primarily on open source technologies. OS X extends this low-level environment with several core infrastructure technologies that make it easier for you to develop software.

High-Level Features

The following sections describe features in the Kernel and Device Drivers layer of OS X.

XPC Interprocess Communication and Services

XPC is an OS X interprocess communication technology that complements App Sandbox by enabling privilege separation. Privilege separation, in turn, is a development strategy in which you divide an app into pieces according to the system resource access that each piece needs. The component pieces that you create are called XPC services.

You create an XPC service as an individual target in your Xcode project. Each service gets its own sandbox—specifically, it gets its own container and its own set of entitlements. In addition, an XPC service that you include with your app is accessible only by your app. These advantages add up to making XPC the best technology for implementing privilege separation in an OS X app.

XPC is integrated with Grand Central Dispatch (GCD). When you create a connection, you associate it with a dispatch queue on which message traffic executes.

When the app is launched, the system automatically registers each XPC service it finds into the namespace visible to the app. An app establishes a connection with one of its XPC services and sends it messages containing events that the service then handles.

For more on XPC Services, read Creating XPC Services in Daemons and Services Programming Guide. To learn more about App Sandbox, read App Sandbox Design Guide.

Caching API

The libcache API is a low-level purgeable caching API. Aggressive caching is an important technique in maximizing app performance. However, when caching demands exceed available memory, the system must free up memory as necessary to handle new demands. Typically, this means paging cached data to and from relatively slow storage devices, sometimes even resulting in systemwide performance degradation. Your app should avoid potential paging overhead by actively managing its data caches, releasing them as soon as it no longer needs the cached data.

In the wider system context, your app can also help by creating caches that the operating system can simply purge on a priority basis as memory pressure necessitates. The libcache library and Foundation framework’s NSCache class help you to create these purgeable caches.

For more information about the functions of the libcache library, see libcache Reference. For more information about the NSCache class, see NSCache Class Reference.

In-Kernel Video Capture

I/O Video provides a kernel-level C++ programming interface for writing video capture device drivers. I/O Video replaces the QuickTime sequence grabber API as a means of getting video into OS X.

I/O Video consists of the IOVideoDevice class on the kernel side (along with various related minor classes) that your driver should subclass, and a user space device interface for communicating with the driver.

For more information, see the IOVideoDevice.h header file in the Kernel framework.

The Kernel

Beneath the appealing, easy-to-use interface of OS X is a rock-solid, UNIX-based foundation that is engineered for stability, reliability, and performance. The kernel environment is built on top of Mach 3.0 and provides high-performance networking facilities and support for multiple, integrated file systems.

The following sections describe some of the key features of the kernel and driver portions of Darwin.

Mach

Mach is at the heart of Darwin because it provides some of the most critical functions of the operating system. Much of what Mach provides is transparent to apps. It manages processor resources such as CPU usage and memory, handles scheduling, enforces memory protection, and implements a messaging-centered infrastructure for untyped interprocess communication, both local and remote. Mach provides the following important advantages to Mac computing:

• Protected memory. The stability of an operating system should not depend on all executing apps being good citizens. Even a well-behaved process can accidentally write data into the address space of the system or another process, which can result in the loss or corruption of data or even precipitate system crashes. Mach ensures that an app cannot write in another app’s memory or in the operating system’s memory. By walling off apps from each other and from system processes, Mach makes it virtually impossible for a single poorly behaved app to damage the rest of the system. Best of all, if an app crashes as the result of its own misbehavior, the crash affects only that app and not the rest of the system.

• Preemptive multitasking. With Mach, processes share the CPU efficiently. Mach watches over the computer’s processor, prioritizing tasks, making sure activity levels are at the maximum, and ensuring that every task gets the resources it needs. It uses certain criteria to decide how important a task is and therefore how much time to allocate to it before giving another task its turn. Your process is not dependent on another process yielding its processing time.

• Advanced virtual memory. In OS X, virtual memory is “on” all the time. The Mach virtual memory system gives each process its own private virtual address space. For 64-bit apps, the theoretical maximum is approximately 18 exabytes, or 18 billion billion bytes. Mach maintains address maps that control the translation of a task’s virtual addresses into physical memory. Typically only a portion of the data or code contained in a task’s virtual address space resides in physical memory at any given time. As pages are needed, they are loaded into physical memory from storage. Mach augments these semantics with the abstraction of memory objects. Named memory objects enable one task (at a sufficiently low level) to map a range of memory, unmap it, and send it to another task. This capability is essential for implementing separate execution environments on the same system.

• Real-time support. This feature guarantees low-latency access to processor resources for time-sensitive media apps.

Mach also enables cooperative multitasking, preemptive threading, and cooperative threading.

64-Bit Kernel

As of v10.8, OS X requires a Mac that uses the 64-bit kernel. A 64-bit kernel provides several benefits:

• The kernel can support large memory configurations more efficiently.

• The maximum size of the buffer cache is increased, potentially improving I/O performance.

• Performance is improved when working with specialized networking hardware that emulates memory mapping across a wire or with multiple video cards containing over 2 GB of video RAM.

Because a 64-bit kernel does not support 32-bit drivers and kernel extensions (KEXTs), those items must be built for 64-bit. Fortunately, for most drivers and KEXTs, building for a 64-bit kernel is usually not as difficult as you might think. For the most part, transitioning a driver or KEXT to be 64-bit capable is just like transitioning any other piece of code. For details about how to make the transition, including what things to check for in your code, see 64-Bit Transition Guide.

Device-Driver Support

Darwin offers an object-oriented framework for developing device drivers called the I/O Kit framework. This framework facilitates the creation of drivers for OS X and provides much of the infrastructure that they need. Written in a restricted subset of C++ and designed to support a range of device families, the I/O Kit is both modular and extensible.

Device drivers created with the I/O Kit acquire several important features:

• True plug and play

• Dynamic device management (“hot plugging”)

• Power management (for both desktops and portables)

If your device conforms to standard specifications—such as those for mice, keyboards, audio input devices, modern MIDI devices, and so on—it should just work when you plug it in. If your device doesn’t conform to a published standard, you can use the I/O Kit resources to create a custom driver to meet your needs. Devices such as AGP cards, PCI and PCIe cards, scanners, and printers usually require custom drivers or other support software in order to work with OS X.

For information on creating device drivers, see IOKit Device Driver Design Guidelines.

Network Kernel Extensions

Darwin allows kernel developers to add networking capabilities to the operating system by creating network kernel extensions (NKEs). The NKE facility allows you to create networking modules and even entire protocol stacks that can be dynamically loaded into the kernel and unloaded from it. NKEs also make it possible to configure protocol stacks automatically.

NKE modules have built-in capabilities for monitoring and modifying network traffic. At the cellspacing='0' cellpadding='5'>Table 6-1 Network protocols

Protocol

Description

802.1x

802.1x is a protocol for implementing port-based network access over wired or wireless LANs. It supports a wide range of authentication methods, including TLS, TTLS, LEAP, MDS, and PEAP (MSCHAPv2, MD5, GTC).

DHCP and BOOTP

The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol and the Bootstrap Protocol automate the assignment of IP addresses in a particular network.

DNS

Domain Name Services is the standard Internet service for mapping host names to IP addresses.

FTP and SFTP

The File Transfer Protocol and Secure File Transfer Protocol are two standard means of moving files between computers on TCP/IP networks.

HTTP and HTTPS

The Hypertext Transport Protocol is the standard protocol for transferring webpages between a web server and browser. OS X provides support for both the insecure and secure versions of the protocol.

LDAP

The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol lets users locate groups, individuals, and resources such as files and devices in a network, whether on the Internet or on a corporate intranet.

NBP

The Name Binding Protocol is used to bind processes across a network.

NTP

The Network Time Protocol is used for synchronizing client clocks.

PAP

The Printer Access Protocol is used for spooling print jobs and printing to network printers.

PPP

For dial-up (modem) access, OS X includes PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol). PPP support includes TCP/IP as well as the PAP and CHAP authentication protocols.

PPPoE

The Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet protocol provides an Ethernet-based dial-up connection for broadband users.

S/MIME

The Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions protocol supports encryption of email and the attachment of digital signatures to validate email addresses.

SLP

Service Location Protocol is designed for the automatic discovery of resources (servers, fax machines, and so on) on an IP network.

SOAP

The Simple Object Access Protocol is a lightweight protocol for exchanging encapsulated messages over the web or other networks.

SSH

The Secure Shell protocol is a safe way to perform a remote login to another computer. Session information is encrypted to prevent unauthorized access of data.

TCP/IP and UDP/IP

OS X provides two transmission-layer protocols, TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and UDP (User Datagram Protocol), to work with the network-layer Internet Protocol (IP). (OS X includes support for IPv6 and IPSec.)

XML-RPC

XML-RPC is a protocol for sending remote procedure calls using XML over the web.

OS X also implements a number of file-sharing protocols; see Table 6-4 for a summary of these protocols.

Network Technologies

OS X supports the network technologies listed in Table 6-2.

Network Diagnostics

Network diagnostics is a way of helping the user solve network problems. Although modern networks are generally reliable, there are still times when network services may fail. Sometimes the cause of the failure is beyond the ability of the desktop user to fix, but sometimes the problem is in the way the user’s computer is configured. The network diagnostics feature provides a diagnostic app to help the user locate problems and correct them.

If your app encounters a network error, you can use the diagnostic interfaces of CFNetwork to launch the diagnostic app and attempt to solve the problem interactively. You can also choose to report diagnostic problems to the user without attempting to solve them.

For more information on using this feature, see Using Network Diagnostics.

File-System Support

The file-system component of Darwin is based on extensions to BSD and an enhanced Virtual File System (VFS) design. The file-system component includes the following features:

• Permissions on removable media. This feature is based on a globally unique ID registered for each connected removable device (including USB and FireWire devices) in the system.

• Access control lists, which support fine-grained access to file-system objects.

• URL-based volume mounts, which enable users (via a Finder command) to mount such things as AppleShare and web servers

• Unified buffer cache, which consolidates the buffer cache with the virtual-memory cache

• Long filenames (255 characters or 755 bytes, based on UTF-8)

• Support for hiding filename extensions on a per-file basis

• Journaling of all file-system types to aid in data recovery after a crash

Because of its multiple app environments and the various kinds of devices it supports, OS X handles file data in many standard volume formats. Table 6-3 lists the supported formats.

HFS+ volumes support aliases, symbolic links, and hard links, whereas UFS volumes support symbolic links and hard links but not aliases. Although an alias and a symbolic link are both lightweight references to a file or directory elsewhere in the file system, they are semantically different in significant ways. For more information, see Aliases and Symbolic Links in File System Overview.

Note: OS X does not support stacking in its file-system design.

Because OS X is intended to be deployed in heterogeneous networks, it also supports several network file-sharing protocols. Table 6-4 lists these protocols.

Security

The roots of OS X in the UNIX operating system provide a robust and secure computing environment whose track record extends back many decades. OS X security services are built on top of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution), an open-source standard. BSD is a form of the UNIX operating system that provides basic security for fundamental services, such as file and network access.

The CommonCrypto library, which is part of libSystem, provides raw cryptographic algorithms. It is intended to replace similar OpenSSL interfaces.

Note: CDSA (Common Data Security Architecture) and OpenSSL are deprecated and their further use is discouraged. Consider using Security Transforms technology to replace CDSA and CommonCrypto to replace OpenSSL. Security Transforms, which are part of the Security framework, are described in Security Services.

OS X also includes the following security features:

• Adoption of Mandatory Access Control, which provides a fine-grained security architecture for controlling the execution of processes at the kernel level. This feature enables the “sandboxing” of apps, which lets you limit the access of a given app to only those features you designate.

• Support for code signing and installer package signing. This feature lets the system validate apps using a digital signature and warn the user if an app is tampered with.

• Compiler support for fortifying your source code against potential security threats. This support includes options to disallow the execution of code located on the stack or other portions of memory containing data.

• Support for putting unknown files into quarantine. This is especially useful for developers of web browsers or other network-based apps that receive files from unknown sources. The system prevents access to quarantined files unless the user explicitly approves that access.

For an introduction to OS X security features, see Security Overview.

Scripting Support

Darwin includes all of the scripting languages commonly found in UNIX-based operating systems. In addition to the scripting languages associated with command-line shells (such as bash and csh), Darwin also includes support for Perl, Python, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and others.

OS X provides scripting bridges to the Objective-C classes of Cocoa. These bridges let you use Cocoa classes from within your Python and Ruby scripts. For information about using these bridges, see Ruby and Python Programming Topics for Mac.

Threading Support

OS X provides full support for creating multiple preemptive threads of execution inside a single process. Threads let your program perform multiple tasks in parallel. For example, you might create a thread to perform some lengthy calculations in the background while a separate thread responds to user events and updates the windows in your app. Using multiple threads can often lead to significant performance improvements in your app, especially on computers with multiple CPU cores. Multithreaded programming is not without its dangers though. It requires careful coordination to ensure your app’s state does not get corrupted.

All user-level threads in OS X are based on POSIX threads (also known as pthreads). A pthread is a lightweight wrapper around a Mach thread, which is the kernel implementation of a thread. You can use the pthreads API directly or use any of the threading packages offered by Cocoa. Although each threading package offers a different combination of flexibility versus ease-of-use, all packages offer roughly the same performance.

In general, you should try to use Grand Central Dispatch or operation objects to perform work concurrently. However, there might still be situations where you need to create threads explicitly. For more information about threading support and guidelines on how to use threads safely, see Threading Programming Guide.

X11

The X11 windowing system is provided as an optional installation component for the system. This windowing system is used by many UNIX applications to draw windows, controls, and other elements of graphical user interfaces. The OS X implementation of X11 uses the Quartz drawing environment to give X11 windows a native OS X feel. This integration also makes it possible to display X11 windows alongside windows from native apps written in Cocoa.

Software Development Support

The following sections describe some additional features of OS X that affect the software development process.

Binary File Architecture

The underlying architecture of OS X executables was built from the beginning with flexibility in mind. This flexibility became important as Mac computers have transitioned from using PowerPC to Intel CPUs and from supporting only 32-bit apps to 64-bit apps. The following sections provide an overview of the types of architectures you can support in your OS X executables along with other information about the runtime and debugging environments available to you.

Hardware Architectures

When OS X was first introduced, it was built to support a 32-bit PowerPC hardware architecture. With Apple’s transition to Intel-based Mac computers, OS X added initial support for 32-bit Intel hardware architectures. In addition to 32-bit support, OS X v10.4 added some basic support for 64-bit architectures as well and this support was expanded in OS X v10.5. This means that apps and libraries can now support two different architectures:

• 32-bit Intel (i386)

• 64-bit Intel (x86_64)

Although apps can support all of these architectures in a single binary, doing so is not required. The ability to create “universal binaries” that run natively on all supported architectures gives OS X the flexibility it needs for the future.

Supporting multiple architectures requires careful planning and testing of your code for each architecture. There are subtle differences from one architecture to the next that can cause problems if not accounted for in your code. For example, some built-in data types have different sizes in 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. Accounting for these differences is not difficult but requires consideration to avoid coding errors.

Xcode provides integral support for creating apps that support multiple hardware architectures. For information about tools support and creating universal binaries. For information about 64-bit support in OS X, including links to documentation for how to make the transition, see 64-Bit Support.

64-Bit Support

OS X was initially designed to support binary files on computers using a 32-bit architecture. In OS X v10.4, however, support was introduced for compiling, linking, and debugging binaries on a 64-bit architecture. This initial support was limited to code written using C or C++ only. In addition, 64-bit binaries could link against the Accelerate framework and libSystem.dylib only.

Starting in OS X v10.5, most system libraries and frameworks are 64-bit ready, meaning they can be used in both 32-bit and 64-bit apps. Frameworks built for 64-bit means you can create apps that address extremely large data sets, up to 128 TB on the current Intel-based CPUs. On Intel-based Macintosh computers, some 64-bit apps may even run faster than their 32-bit equivalents because of the availability of extra processor resources in 64-bit mode.

There are a few technologies that have not been ported to 64-bit. Development of 32-bit apps with these APIs is still supported, but if you want to create a 64-bit app, you must use alternative technologies. Among these APIs are the following:

• The entire QuickTime C API (deprecated in OS X v10.9; in a 64-bit app, use AV Foundation instead)

• HIToolbox, Window Manager, and most other user interface APIs (in general, use Cocoa UI classes and other alternatives); see 64-Bit Guide for Carbon Developers for the list of specific APIs and transition paths.

OS X uses the LP64 model that is in use by other 64-bit UNIX systems, which means fewer headaches when porting from other operating systems. For general information on the LP64 model and how to write 64-bit apps, see 64-Bit Transition Guide. For Cocoa-specific transition information, see 64-Bit Transition Guide for Cocoa.

Object File Formats

OS X is capable of loading object files that use several different object-file formats. Mach-O format is the format used for all native OS X app development.

For information about the Mach-O file format, see OS X ABI Mach-O File Format Reference. For additional information about using Mach-O files, see Mach-O Programming Topics.

Debug File Formats

Whenever you debug an executable file, the debugger uses symbol information generated by the compiler to associate user-readable names with the procedure and data address it finds in memory. Normally, this user-readable information is not needed by a running program and is stripped out (or never generated) by the compiler to save space in the resulting binary file. For debugging, however, this information is very important to be able to understand what the program is doing.

OS X supports two different debug file formats for compiled executables: Stabs and DWARF. The Stabs format is present in all versions of OS X and until the introduction of Xcode 2.4 was the default debugging format. Code compiled with Xcode 2.4 and later uses the DWARF debugging format by default. When using the Stabs format, debugging symbols, like other symbols are stored in the symbol table of the executable; see OS X ABI Mach-O File Format Reference. With the DWARF format, debugging symbols are stored either in a specialized segment of the executable or in a separate debug-information file.

For information about the DWARF standard, go to The DWARF Debugging Standard; for information about the Stabs debug file format, see STABS Debug Format. For additional information about Mach-O files and their stored symbols, see Mach-O Programming Topics.

Runtime Environments

Since its first release, OS X has supported several different environments for running apps. The most prominent of these environments is the dynamic link editor (dyld) environment, which is also the only environment supported for active development. Most of the other environments provided legacy support during the transition from Mac OS 9 to OS X and are no longer supported for active development. The following sections describe the runtime environments you may encounter in various versions of OS X.

dyld Runtime Environment

The dyld runtime environment is the native environment in OS X and is used to load, link, and execute Mach-O files. At the heart of this environment is the dyld dynamic loader program, which handles the loading of a program’s code modules and associated dynamic libraries, resolves any dependencies between those libraries and modules, and begins the execution of the program.

Upon loading a program’s code modules, the dynamic loader performs the minimal amount of symbol binding needed to launch your program and get it running. This binding process involves resolving links to external libraries and loading them as their symbols are used. The dynamic loader takes a lazy approach to binding individual symbols, doing so only as they are used by your code. Symbols in your code can be strongly linked or weakly linked. Strongly linked symbols cause the dynamic loader to terminate your program if the library containing the symbol cannot be found or the symbol is not present in the library. Weakly linked symbols terminate your program only if the symbol is not present and an attempt is made to use it.

For more information about the dynamic loader program, see the dyld man page. For information about building and working with Mach-O executable files, see Mach-O Programming Topics.

If it’s not what you expected or there’s something wrong with the appearance, you will probably want to download a new version of the font from a different site or try a new type of font.Step 3: At the bottom of the Font Book preview window you will see the option to Install the font. In theory, Font Book makes a font available for all apps on MacOS. Click the button and the font will be installed on your Mac. Mac install system library fonts download. You can change the typeface with the drop-down menu at the top of the window to get a better look at the font’s different weights and styles.

Language Support

The tools that come with OS X provide direct support for developing software using the Swift, C, C++, Objective-C, and Objective-C++ languages along with numerous scripting languages. Support for other languages may also be provided by third-party developers. For more information on the key features of Swift and Objective-C, see Development Languages

Copyright © 2004, 2015 Apple Inc. All Rights Reserved. Terms of Use Privacy Policy Updated: 2015-09-16

OS X provides many benefits to the Macintoshuser and developer communities. These benefits include improvedreliability and performance, enhanced networking features, an object-basedsystem programming interface, and increased support for industrystandards.

In creating OS X, Apple has completely re-engineered theMac OS core operating system. Forming the foundation of OS Xis the kernel. Figure 3-1 illustrates the OS X architecture.

The kernel provides many enhancements for OS X. Theseinclude preemption, memory protection,enhanced performance, improved networking facilities, support for bothMacintosh (Extended and Standard) and non-Macintosh (UFS, ISO 9660,and so on) file systems, object-oriented APIs, and more. Two ofthese features, preemption and memory protection, lead to a morerobust environment.

In Mac OS 9, applications cooperate to share processor time.Similarly, all applications share the memory of the computer amongthem. Mac OS 9 is a cooperative multitasking environment.The responsiveness of all processes is compromised if even a single applicationdoesn’t cooperate. On the other hand, real-time applications suchas multimedia need to be assured of predictable, time-critical,behavior.

Library Kernel Machine

In contrast, OS X is a preemptive multitasking environment.In OS X, the kernel provides enforcement of cooperation, schedulingprocesses to share time (preemption). This supports real-time behaviorin applications that require it.

In OS X, processes do not normally share memory. Instead,the kernel assigns each process its own addressspace, controlling access to these address spaces. Thiscontrol ensures that no application can inadvertently access ormodify another application’s memory (protection). Size is notan issue; with the virtual memory system included in OS X, eachapplication has access to its own 4 GB address space.

Viewed together, all applications are said to run in userspace, but this does not imply that they share memory. User spaceis simply a term for the combined address spaces of all user-levelapplications. The kernel itself has its own address space, calledkernel space. In OS X, no application can directly modify thememory of the system software (the kernel).

Although user processes do not share memory by default asin Mac OS 9, communication (and even memory sharing) between applicationsis still possible. For example, the kernel offers a rich set ofprimitives to permit some sharing of information among processes. Theseprimitives include shared libraries, frameworks, and POSIX sharedmemory. Mach messaging provides another approach, handing memoryfrom one process to another. Unlike Mac OS 9, however, memory sharingcannot occur without explicit action by the programmer.

Darwin

The OS X kernel is an Open Source project.The kernel, along with other core parts of OS X are collectivelyreferred to as Darwin. Darwin is a complete operatingsystem based on many of the same technologies that underlie OS X. However, Darwin does not include Apple’s proprietary graphicsor applications layers, such as Quartz, QuickTime, Cocoa, Carbon,or OpenGL.

Figure 3-2 shows the relationship between Darwin and OS X. Both build upon the same kernel, but OS X adds Core Services,Application Services and QuickTime, as well as the Classic, Carbon, Cocoa,and Java (JDK) application environments. Both Darwin and OS X include the BSD command-line application environment; however,in OS X, use of environment is not required, and thus it ishidden from the user unless they choose to access it.

Darwin technology is based on BSD, Mach3.0, and Apple technologies. Best of all, Darwin technology is OpenSource technology, which means that developers have full accessto the source code. In effect, OS X third-party developers canbe part of the Darwin core system software development team. Developerscan also see how Apple is doing things in the core operating systemand adopt (or adapt) code to use within their own products. Referto the Apple Public Source License (APSL) fordetails.

Because the same software forms the core of both OS Xand Darwin, developers can create low-level software that runs onboth OS X and Darwin with few, if any, changes. The only differenceis likely to be in the way the software interacts with the applicationenvironment.

Darwin is based on proven technology from many sources. Alarge portion of this technology is derived from FreeBSD, a versionof 4.4BSD that offers advanced networking, performance, security,and compatibility features. Other parts of the system software,such as Mach, are based on technology previously used in Apple’sMkLinux project, in OS X Server, and in technology acquiredfrom NeXT. Much of the code is platform-independent. All of thecore operating-system code is available in source form.

The core technologies have been chosen for several reasons.Mach provides a clean set of abstractions for dealing with memorymanagement, interprocess (and interprocessor) communication (IPC),and other low-level operating-system functions. In today’s rapidly changinghardware environment, this provides a useful layer of insulationbetween the operating system and the underlying hardware.

BSD is a carefully engineered, mature operating system withmany capabilities. In fact, most of today’s commercial UNIX andUNIX-like operating systems contain a great deal of BSD code. BSDalso provides a set of industry-standard APIs.

New technologies, such as the I/O Kit and Network Kernel Extensions(NKEs), have been designed and engineered by Apple to take advantageof advanced capabilities, such as those provided by an object-orientedprogramming model. OS X combines these new technologies withtime-tested industry standards to create an operating system thatis stable, reliable, flexible, and extensible.

Architecture

The foundation layer of Darwin and OS X is composed ofseveral architectural components, as shown in Figure 3-3. Taken together, thesecomponents form the kernel environment.

Important: Note that OS X uses the term kernel somewhatdifferently than you might expect.

“A kernel, in traditional operating-system terminology,is a small nucleus of software that provides only the minimal facilitiesnecessary for implementing additional operating-system services.”— from The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSDOperating System, McKusick, Bostic, Karels, and Quarterman,1996.

Similarly, in traditional Mach-based operating systems, thekernel refers to the Mach microkernel and ignores additional low-levelcode without which Mach does very little.

In OS X, however, the kernel environment contains muchmore than the Mach kernel itself. The OS X kernel environmentincludes the Mach kernel, BSD, the I/O Kit, file systems, and networkingcomponents. These are often referred to collectively as the kernel.Each of these components is described briefly in the following sections.For further details, refer to the specific component chapters orto the reference material listed in the bibliography.

Library Kernel32 Methods

Because OS X contains three basic components (Mach, BSD,and the I/O Kit), there are also frequently as many as three APIsfor certain key operations. In general, the API chosen should matchthe part of the kernel where it is being used, which in turn isdictated by what your code is attempting to do. The remainder ofthis chapter describes Mach, BSD, and the I/O Kit and outlines thefunctionality that is provided by those components.

Mach

Mach manages processor resources such as CPU usage and memory,handles scheduling, provides memory protection, and provides a messaging-centeredinfrastructure to the rest of the operating-system layers. The Machcomponent provides

• untyped interprocesscommunication (IPC)

• remote procedure calls (RPC)

• scheduler support for symmetric multiprocessing (SMP)

• support for real-time services

• virtual memory support

• support for pagers

• modular architecture

General information about Mach may be found in the chapter Mach Overview. Informationabout scheduling can be found in the chapter Mach Scheduling and Thread Interfaces.Information about the VM system can be found in Memory and Virtual Memory.

BSD

Above the Mach layer, the BSD layer provides “OS personality”APIs and services. The BSD layer is based on the BSD kernel, primarily FreeBSD.The BSD component provides

• file systems

• networking (except for the hardware device level)

• UNIX security model

• syscall support

• the BSD process model, including process IDs and signals

• FreeBSD kernel APIs

• many of the POSIX APIs

• kernel support for pthreads (POSIX threads)

The BSD component is described in more detail in the chapter BSD Overview.

Intel Math Kernel Library Mac

Networking

OS X networking takes advantage of BSD’s advanced networkingcapabilities to provide support for modern features, such as NetworkAddress Translation (NAT) and firewalls.The networking component provides

• 4.4BSD TCP/IPstack and socket APIs

• support for both IP and DDP (AppleTalk transport)

• multihoming

• routing

• multicast support

• server tuning

• packet filtering

• Mac OS Classic support (through filters)

More information about networking may be found in the chapter Network Architecture.

File Systems

OS X provides support for numerous types of file systems,including HFS, HFS+, UFS, NFS, ISO9660, and others. The default file-system type is HFS+;OS X boots (and “roots”) from HFS+, UFS, ISO, NFS, and UDF.Advanced features of OS X file systems include an enhanced VirtualFile System (VFS) design. VFS provides for alayered architecture (file systems are stackable).The file system component provides

• UTF-8 (Unicode)support

• increased performance over previous versions of Mac OS.

More information may be found in the chapter File Systems Overview.

I/O Kit

The I/O Kit provides a framework for simplified driver development,supporting many categories of devices.The I/O Kit features an object-orientedI/O architecture implemented in a restricted subset of C++. TheI/O Kit framework is both modular and extensible. The I/O Kit componentprovides

• true plugand play

• dynamic device management

• dynamic (“on-demand”) loading of drivers

• power management for desktop systems as well as portables

• multiprocessor capabilities

Library Kernel Mac Os

The I/O Kit is described in greater detail in the chapter I/O Kit Overview.

Kernel Extensions

OS X provides a kernel extension mechanism as a meansof allowing dynamic loading of pieces of code into kernel space,without the need to recompile. These pieces of code are known genericallyas plug-ins or, in the OS X kernel environment,as kernel extensions or KEXTs.

Because KEXTs provide both modularity and dynamic loadability,they are a natural choice for any relatively self-contained servicethat requires access to interfaces that are not exported to userspace. Many of the components of the kernel environment supportthis extension mechanism, though they do so in different ways.

For example, some of the new networking features involve theuse of network kernel extensions (NKEs). Theseare discussed in the chapter Network Architecture.

The ability to dynamically add a new file-system implementationis based on VFS KEXTs. Device drivers and device families in theI/O Kit are implemented using KEXTs. KEXTs make development mucheasier for developers writing drivers or those writing code to supporta new volume format or networking protocol. KEXTs are discussedin more detail in the chapter Kernel Extension Overview.

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