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> - Swift No part of the Darwin base OS is implemented in Swift, so it can hardly be considered relevant to OS research. > - XPC Services / Sandbox Kinda nea

> - Swift No part of the Darwin base OS is implemented in Swift, so it can hardly be considered relevant to OS research. > - XPC Services / Sandbox Kinda neat, but OS level isolation mechanisms have been a staple of UNIXes for decades: FreeBSD jails, Linux VServer, Linux seccomp, Solaris Zones, Linux grsecurity, SELinux, NT's security stuff (Windows Integrity Mechanism?)... > - Grand Central Dispatch It's a thread pool - does it have a system-wide idea of how many jobs there are? Neat. But I'm guessing it's just a user-space library + daemon? > - IO Kit (C++ drivers) Being able to implement drivers in an unsafe system programming language that was designed for such use cases like C++ is not particularly remarkable. > - System Integrity Protection From the Wikipedia article I get the impression that this is firstly about refusing to load unsigned kernel drivers, which NT has been doing since Vista (and even some Linux distributions now on UEFI secure boot enabled systems), and secondly about restricting root user with MAC based security mechanisms, similar to Trusted Solaris, Linux grsecurity, or SELinux. > - Metal AMD did it first, with Mantle. Now everybody is doing it. > - Replacing C by Objective-C on the low level APIs Guess nobody else has done this one. But wasn't it already the case in NeXTSTEP?

pjmlp 11y ago
OS research is much more than what happens in the kernel space. >> - Swift > No part of the Darwin base OS is implemented in Swift, so it can hardly be considered relevant to OS research. It is the only UNIX based OS moving away from C as their main language. All presentations at WWDC, except the new Objective-C updates, were about Swift. Maybe in some future version, Swift gets to be allowed at lower levels. >> - XPC Services / Sandbox >Kinda neat, but OS level isolation mechanisms have been a staple of UNIXes for decades: FreeBSD jails, Linux VServer, Linux seccomp, Solaris Zones, Linux grsecurity, SELinux, NT's security stuff (Windows Integrity Mechanism?)... You failed to understand that developing applications with XPC Services is similar to applications in micro-kernel based OS. Also it is a container model imposed upon developers that wish to target Apple systems. Whereas the other UNIXes container models are optional. >> - Grand Central Dispatch >It's a thread pool - does it have a system-wide idea of how many jobs there are? Neat. But I'm guessing it's just a user-space library + daemon? No, it is implemented at kernel level. It was good enough that FreeBSD adopted it. Solaris is probably the only other UNIX that used to offer something similar. >> - IO Kit (C++ drivers) >Being able to implement drivers in an unsafe system programming language that was designed for such use cases like C++ is not particularly remarkable. C++ is way safer than C. Those that code C with a C++ compiler should keep using a C compiler. What other UNIX has moved away from C and required C++, none. Hence why it is remarkable. >> - System Integrity Protection >From the Wikipedia article I get the impression that this is firstly about refusing to load unsigned kernel drivers, which NT has been doing since Vista (and even some Linux distributions now on UEFI secure boot enabled systems), and secondly about restricting root user with MAC based security mechanisms, similar to Trusted Solaris, Linux grsecurity, or SELinux. With the difference this is applied to a normal consumer OS. Again research is not only kernel code. >> - Metal >AMD did it first, with Mantle. Now everybody is doing it. AMD doesn't ship OSes. >> - Replacing C by Objective-C on the low level APIs >Guess nobody else has done this one. But wasn't it already the case in NeXTSTEP? No, it was all pretty much plain C at the lowest level. Now some of those C APIs have actually OO Objective-C APIs.

pjmlp 11y ago

OS research is much more than what happens in the kernel space. >> - Swift > No part of the Darwin base OS is implemented in Swift, so it can hardly be considered relevant to OS research. It is the only UNIX based OS moving away from C as their main language. All presentations at WWDC, except the new Objective-C updates, were about Swift. Maybe in some future version, Swift gets to be allowed at lower levels. >> - XPC Services / Sandbox >Kinda neat, but OS level isolation mechanisms have been a staple of UNIXes for decades: FreeBSD jails, Linux VServer, Linux seccomp, Solaris Zones, Linux grsecurity, SELinux, NT's security stuff (Windows Integrity Mechanism?)... You failed to understand that developing applications with XPC Services is similar to applications in micro-kernel based OS. Also it is a container model imposed upon developers that wish to target Apple systems. Whereas the other UNIXes container models are optional. >> - Grand Central Dispatch >It's a thread pool - does it have a system-wide idea of how many jobs there are? Neat. But I'm guessing it's just a user-space library + daemon? No, it is implemented at kernel level. It was good enough that FreeBSD adopted it. Solaris is probably the only other UNIX that used to offer something similar. >> - IO Kit (C++ drivers) >Being able to implement drivers in an unsafe system programming language that was designed for such use cases like C++ is not particularly remarkable. C++ is way safer than C. Those that code C with a C++ compiler should keep using a C compiler. What other UNIX has moved away from C and required C++, none. Hence why it is remarkable. >> - System Integrity Protection >From the Wikipedia article I get the impression that this is firstly about refusing to load unsigned kernel drivers, which NT has been doing since Vista (and even some Linux distributions now on UEFI secure boot enabled systems), and secondly about restricting root user with MAC based security mechanisms, similar to Trusted Solaris, Linux grsecurity, or SELinux. With the difference this is applied to a normal consumer OS. Again research is not only kernel code. >> - Metal >AMD did it first, with Mantle. Now everybody is doing it. AMD doesn't ship OSes. >> - Replacing C by Objective-C on the low level APIs >Guess nobody else has done this one. But wasn't it already the case in NeXTSTEP? No, it was all pretty much plain C at the lowest level. Now some of those C APIs have actually OO Objective-C APIs.