Darwin (operating system)

Darwin is a free Unix operating system of the company Apple and forms the basis for Mac OS X. Darwin does not include a graphical user interface.

Architecture, functional description and system requirements

Darwin XNU kernel is a hybrid kernel, that is, it tries to combine the advantages of a monolithic kernel, with the advantages of a microkernel. Darwin is based on FreeBSD userland and a Mach kernel and thus forms for users and software an interface for communicating with the hardware.

Darwin runs on PPC processors, x86 processors and ARM processors. While all programs for Darwin also run on Mac OS X, work tailored to Mac OS X programs do not necessarily on Darwin. The mobile operating system, Apple iOS for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Apple TV also based on Darwin, but the user does not have the command line does not have access to the file system. This limitation, however, can turn through a jailbreak.

Licensing and Marketing

Darwin is released under the Apple Public Source License, recognized since the 2.0 version of the Free Software Foundation as a free software license. The mascot of Darwin is Hexley, the platypus.

History

Open Darwin was an incarnation of the operating system Darwin, the developers made ​​it possible to develop the CVS tree without having to register with Apple. The main objective here was that you could cooperate in the current system kernel, as OpenDarwin always been based on the live Darwin CVS.

OpenDarwin was founded in April 2002 by the ISC and Apple. It was anyone is free to join the project, but many members were Apple or Darwin developers. The target was a self- Darwin Distribution, as a platform for both PowerPC and x86 architectures should be supported. On July 26, 2006 by Open Darwin was discontinued due to lack of support from the community. On the official website, which was accessible to 28 June 2007, which gave administrators last as the reason that the set goals of the project were not achieved in four years.

The released in November 2007 version of Darwin is 8.11.0 (PPC ) or 8.11.1 ( x86) and is also used in Mac OS X 10.4.11 (Tiger). Version 9.0 is used in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard ) and version 10.0 comes with Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) to use. In OS X 10.7 (Lion ) Darwin used 11.0. The x86 versions since version 8.3.1 carry around a point higher minor version number. New versions are always released shortly after the corresponding Mac OS X versions.