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Apple Is Looking for Linux Kernel Developers
- CivilEngineer 9y agoAlthough maybe it's too hard to find "osx kernel developers" outside of Apple so they look for the next best thing. It may not be a sign of them switching to Linux.
- WhyNotHugo 9y agoI think for that sort of stuff, they'd put an ad for "Kernel Developer", and just ask for Linux (or BSD) experience. This sort of ad seems to indicate they'd hire somebody to actually work on Linux stuff.
- lykr0n 9y agoWouldn't it be cool if they are thinking about moving to the Linux kernel to reduce overhead?
- danieldk 9y agoNot if that means the end of I/O Kit as a relatively stable driver interface.
- primitur 9y agoBut YES PLEASE if it means we don't have to deal with endless new bugs introduced by their heinous QA of lately .. APFS, root logins, &etc.
- vbezhenar 9y agoDoes it have anything with kernel? I thought that those bugs are mostly userspace.
- michel-slm 9y agoThe one recent kernel bug I remember is poll returning early: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/10/11/poll-on-mac-10-12-is-broken/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/10/11/poll-on-mac-10-12-is-...
- mjcl 9y agoI would expect that the wholesale change from Darwin to Linux would introduce an amazing number of new and awful bugs. It's not like their development processes will suddenly be fixed when it's been touched by Linux.
- primitur 9y agoI believe Linux (the kernel) has one of the most productive, QA production lines out there. If Apple were to adopt the "Linux way", we may indeed see a change .. On the other hand, it may work against us, having Apple involved in Linux things. I'm not sold either way - but I sit here, re-installing MacOS on two Macbook Pro's, both of which absolutely refuse to make a usable/safe disk image out of their own disks. This is such a frustrating conundrum, it feels like Solaris in the 90's. I can only hope something changes at Apple, or else I'm just going to wipe MacOS and put Linux on these machines. That is quite a watershed, imho.
- TheAceOfHearts 9y agoHave you run a drive test? If you're having storage errors it could manifest itself in weird ways.
- primitur 9y agoYes, I've done it and Disk Utility doesn't think there's anything wrong. But yet, I've tried over and over to make a disk image - of different disks, even - and every single time I get the error "no usable disk image found". At this point, after having scoured the web for clues, I can only conclude: this is a bug in MacOS. I'm now trying to do a full update to the latest release, and see if it works beyond that point - but if it doesn't, the good ol' tarball approach is all I've got left. I think Apple has some QA issues.
- vbezhenar 9y agoMay be they want to write Linux drivers for their Macs? They did that for Windows.
- my123 9y agoThey want ARM experience, presages some future Macs :P And note that it's within Apple's silicon validation team.
- blinkingled 9y agoExcept the focus of both job ads is embedded/SoCs that sort of thing.
- bobbytherobot 9y agoNot just Linux Kernel, but embedded Linux Kernel. If it was just Linux Kernel development, I would assume it was for cloud storage.
- ianai 9y agoCould it just be they’ve had people leave them? Their QA seems to indicate this is possible anyway.
- monocasa 9y agoI know some places that consider storage appliances, even the big boy ones, to be 'embedded'.
- dralley 9y agoOr their Apple Car project.
- cbHXBY1D 9y agoBingo. Apple has a good amount of engineers working on Linux and QNX embedded devices. I think it's pretty clear at this point that they are still working on cars and that they are also integrating those cars with Apple maps. I think they want to kill two birds with one stone with Project Titan: get more map data and develop software for self-driving cars.
- coatmatter 9y agoTexas and California; I wonder if that's a clue too. If so, it'd be very interesting, especially at a time when Waymo is now the only one left with a clean sheet. I wonder how far away Apple is from a product?
- Mononokay 9y agoEmbedded devices—what's the HomePod running?
- Operyl 9y agoSame thing most of their devices are ultimately running, now, some variation of iOS. EDIT: https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/890961474277056513 https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/89096147427705651...
- blinkingled 9y agoA very far fetched possibility would be that Macs will run iOS - no UNIX stuff exposed, everything signed and secure. An embedded SoC will run in secure space and expose Linux in a iOS terminal application so you can do all your development work - ssh, vim and whatnot there. Kind of like WSL but instead main OS is completely locked down and instead of software emulation you get isolated hardware to run Linux.
- mankash666 9y agoTo enable iOS apps on the Mac, they only need to activate the iOS developer API with their existing OS - Darwin. AFAIK, iOS and macos share the same kernel, more or less
- bitwize 9y agoBut that won't lock down the BSD API all macOS apps have access to.
- matthewmacleod 9y agoYeah, it’s worth pointing out that iOS already runs on the mac, as anybody who’s used the simulator knows.
- scarface74 9y agoJust to be clearer, when you run iOS apps under the simulator, the code is compiled as x86 assembly and linked against an x86 version of the iOS framework. There's no emulation involved.
- vbezhenar 9y agoWhat's wrong with exposing UNIX stuff? When I jailbroke my iPhone and ssh-ed into it, there were UNIX tools there. I'm not sure whether they are from iOS or from jailbreak.
- rcarmo 9y agoThey already ship a perfectly good hypervisor with macOS that is able to run a Linux kernel (and is used by Docker for Mac and many other projects).
- robbyt 9y agoProbably for custom networking or storage hardware. Apple is a major high tech corporation, and what OS runs their data centers? (Not MacOS)
- digi_owl 9y agoYeah my first thought went to some new version of their Time Capsule product.
- derefr 9y agoNetBSD, IIRC. (Which you might say is the "upstream" of Apple's Darwin in about the same way that Debian is the upstream of Ubuntu.)
- riffraff 9y agoDon't you mean freebsd?
- derefr 9y agoNope: https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/products.html#darwin https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/products.html#darwin
- jsnell 9y agoThat link does not say Apple is using NetBSD in the datacenter. It says that some of the userland tools in OS X come from NetBSD.
- derefr 9y agoMy response was just to counter the common misapprehension that macOS itself is built on a FreeBSD userland. It's NetBSD, and devices like the AirPort Extreme/Time Capsule use NetBSD directly. And, back when the iTunes Store was a WebObjects service, it was hosted on Xserves running a weird reverse-Darwin (i.e. a Darwin-shimmed userland atop a NetBSD kernel, because macOS itself wasn't yet performant enough to be a good server but they still needed WebObjects to run.) These days, Apple's datacenters are running all sorts of things, including Darwin, Linux, Solaris, and AIX[1]. But the "Darwin" part is still essentially NetBSD, not FreeBSD. [1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/tale-of-two-data-center-strategies-apple-vs-facebook/?tag=content;siu-container http://www.zdnet.com/article/tale-of-two-data-center-strateg...
- nbsd4life 9y agoIf you like open source, don't work for Apple. I've seen multiple people stop all their open source contributions and communicating online after being hired by them. I assume they have very draconian NDAs.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dralley 9y agoUnless you happen to work on one of the open source projects they're involved with, I suppose. LLVM, Clang, Webkit etc.
- dboreham 9y agoApache Traffic Server
- scarface74 9y agoOr CUPS or Darwin. No major technology company open sources their Crown Jewels.
- michel-slm 9y agoFrom what I hear, at Apple you're not allowed to contribute to open source projects (unless it's part of your day job) even in your own time - in contrast to Google (from what I hear) and Facebook (personal experience) where you can but you must clear it with legal and it can't be related to your day job.
- solomatov 9y agoAnd how does it work in CA? AFAIU, there're laws which prevent such limitations in most cases. I.e. everything which is done on the person's time is their own choice.
- kristoffer 9y agoNote: Silicon validation engineer. They probably use Linux as extra validation for their chips.
- jijojv 9y agoApple is indeed hiring - e.g. https://jobs.apple.com/us/search?#&ss=Linux%20Driver%20and%20Kernel%20Developer https://jobs.apple.com/us/search?#&ss=Linux%20Driver%20and%2...
- dmitrygr 9y agoMost Apple SOCs boot Linux inside apple HQ to run tests. There are drivers for everything and it all works. Linux turns out to be a more convenient way to do validation and testing than iOS. Obviously this code is never released outside of apple. Source: ex-applers
- nomel 9y agoDo you mean Darwin? Or is there an actual Linux/non-BSD install?
- matthewmacleod 9y agoI’ve also heard that this is the case. Linux means Linux; Darwin is an entirely different operating system, though it uses some BSD user land.
- twotwotwo 9y agoNote it looks like it's for developing drivers to run on embedded ARM devices in silicon validation. I'm at least as uninformed as anybody here, but that has lots of non-earth-shaking interpretations. If you have, say, a farm of little ARM-driven devices that you use as test harnesses for chips or other hardware, it isn't necessarily cheaper to port whatever variation of xnu to this particular hardware than to use an existing port of Linux and hire some folks who can help with the low level I/O bits. There might even be Linux in your world because, e.g. an acquired company built something on it that hasn't been worth porting. Or any of a ton of other possibilities. Having an OS doesn't mean you have to use (variations of) it for everything, especially if the new use you're thinking about is far from your usual.
- ausjke 9y agoyes i noticed that job posting and it is actually very close to where I live, I even thought about applying, then I'm not an apple fan and I don't appreciate the way Apple deals with OSS, so I stopped. it's about chip validation and has nothing to do with MacOS etc, because it will be pretty unwise to use MacOS to check silicons.
- baybal2 9y agoFinally throwing out Mach out of the window or something needed for something else?
- kineticfocus 9y agoI'm surprised I haven't seen Fuchsia mentioned... anywhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia