Technology

58303 readers

3845 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

271

FreeBSD To See Better Laptop Support With Investment Backed By AMD, Dell & Framework. (www.phoronix.com)

submitted 23 hours ago by 101@feddit.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

28 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 18 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

MacOS and iOS have Freebsd inside their kernel. The reason it doesn't appear to have been updated in ages is the problem listed by the OP: The BSD license meant that Apple could take without ever giving back. Which is what they did.

[–] leisesprecher@feddit.org 17 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

First of all the nitpicky stuff: Mac OS never used anything FreeBSD in the kernel. The kernel is XNU/mach, FreeBSD only supplies the user land. Pedantic, but we have a cliche to defend.

Anyway, I think you got the update part backwards. Apple doesn't update its side of the deal. MacOS ships with old bsd apps, simply because apple doesn't care all that much about it.

[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world -2 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3446231/how-closely-are-mac-os-x-and-bsd-related

of the major subsystems of the kernel, only the network stack and the VFS were still truly BSD.

So there were parts of the kernel taken directly from FreeBSD, and OSX was designed around it.

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 9 points 20 hours ago

So there were parts of the kernel taken directly from FreeBSD

That would also be true for Windows NT, and many other systems to be honest, because BSD is where TCP/IP support in Unix originated, it had the best implementation (or maybe not the best, but the de-facto reference one).

and OSX was designed around it

No, that's not true, you are not paying attention.

It has its userland (that'd be Unix tools like cp, ls and find) from some fossilized version of FreeBSD and not updated a lot since that. It's not much. How do you think, would FreeBSD benefit from their fixes in ls? It's the other way around, FreeBSD's userland is much better.

Their actual kernel (XNU) sources they, despite not being obligated, release from time to time.

But say they used Linux, there still would be nothing to force them to release their drivers' sources or their GUI's sources (which are closed).

You could have made your case with Sony (I'm still not sure if that'd be of much use), but not with Apple.

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 points 20 hours ago

I've said in another comment that you got it wrong and how. It's the other way around with things not getting updated - the stuff in MacOS is old, not the stuff in FreeBSD. But that doesn't matter, because what Apple took from FreeBSD it actually does release among other things from time to time under their own license, only it's of no use for anyone, because their real proprietary strength is the Cocoa layer and GUI. If they used Linux, they would still not be obligated to release the sources for those. I think you see the problem with your reasoning, knowing that.