Re: Apple's Darwin commitment

On Tue, Sep 13, 2005 at 07:42:09PM +0000, Adrian Gschwend wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Sep 2005 14:29:30 UTC, Rob Braun <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
> 
> Hi Rob,
> 
> > However, it is freely available and at least partially open.  As
> 
> Could you describe "partially open"? I just had a look at 
> opendarwin.org and couldn't really find much about how much of the 
> code is open except the statement "The source code is available via 
> the web at:" and the big list with source. Does this contain the whole
> Mach Kernel including the BSD personality, I/O Kit, networking layer 
> etc?

http://darwinsource.opendarwin.org/ are the sources as published by
Apple.  xnu is the kernel, which is probably what you are looking for
despite mach, bsd, and iokit being composed of many different pieces
of software throughout the system.
I say darwin is "at least partially open" because some things included
on the darwin install CD are not open source, some things required
to build certain darwin components are not open source, and some things
required to build some darwin components are not available at all.

> I do have some ideas in this reagard and I do have a team of 
> developers who would probably joinging those efforts in case there is 
> a fair chance that we can reach our goals.

I'm not sure what your goals are, but you may want to look at darwinbuild:
http://www.opendarwin.org/projects/darwinbuild/
while you are looking at the darwin source.


> Do you have a Wiki somewhere where the current progress is documented?
> I just found the todo-wiki which doesn't really describe how to build 
> it and where to get what.

All of this is a work in progress.  Apple uses a proprietary build system
to build their software, which us poor mortals do not have access to.
However, Kevin at Apple and several other people have been working on
a system to emulate Apple's build system as closely as possible, and this
is available to us poor mortals.  This is the first thing that allows us 
to at least attempt to build the Darwin sources as closely as possible to
how Apple builds them for OS X.

There is a wiki.opendarwin.org, which you are free to use and contribute
to, but most of the interesting work happens on irc (#opendarwin on
irc.freenode.net) and on the mailing lists (usually on specific projects,
such as darwinbuild@).

> Yes, that's the part where we probably would like to step in as well. 
> What's the status of device drivers, can device drivers from MacOS X 
> be used on Darwin? I talk about low-level stuff now like IDE drivers, 
> not graphics drivers or such stuff related to the GUI.

Yes, Mac OS X drivers will work on Darwin, provided their dependencies
are met.  Virtually all of the source in Darwin is a subset of the 
source in Mac OS X.  Some of the Darwin sources are stripped down
versions of what comes from OS X, some are verbatim duplicates of
what is used in OS X, and some have been modified to cope with other
dependencies that do not exist in Darwin but do in OS X.

Rob