[VIVA College]

[Case Study on
Darwin]
By:=>
Nishant Nair

09
2
 VIVA
Vishnu Waman Thakur Charitable Trust’s
College Of Arts, Commerce and Science

CERTIFICATE
FOR CASE STUDY
This is to Certify That NISHANT NAIR OF S.Y.Bsc. (IT)
Class Has Satisfactory completed the case study on DARWIN for the
year 2008-09

Professor-in-Charge Head of the Dept

Date: College Stamp

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 Darwin
Darwin is the UNIX technology-based foundation of Mac OS X.
Darwin integrates several technologies. Among the most important are
4.4BSD-based operating-system services (built on the Mach 3.0
microkernel), the I/O Kit, networking facilities, and support for multiple
integrated file systems. Developers can use Darwin to port UNIX/Linux
applications and create kernel extensions. Darwin is Mac OS X without
the user interface. The BSD Unix and Mach 3.0 based Kernel connects
since the first release in 1999 characteristics of the booth worlds Apple
and UNIX. Mac OS X has beside the Mac OS predecessor his origin in
the knowhow of NeXT technology, taken over by Apple in 1997. NeXT
has developed the OPENSTEP operating system which was the further
development of NEXTSTEP which in turn is based on 4.3 BSD. Apple
supports actively the BSD community, because Darwin is compatible
with the FreeBSD distribution as a reference and takes advance of much
open source projects. Mac OS X merge therefore the efficiency and
stability of UNIX (protected memory area) with the simple usability of
MacOS.

Affected by the open source concept developers of Apple and the open
source community work together for the PowerPC and x86 operating
system version. Modifications and further developments flow back to
the public, after a free registration the source code can be downloaded
from the Apple web site. It can not be excluded that Darwin with his
operating system core xnu splits up into independent distribution. All
developed applications for the Darwin system core work also under Mac
OS X, except for special Mac OS X applications which do not run
directly under Darwin. Standard format for executable applications in
Darwin is Mach-O. Support for the primarily by Linux program used
.ELF format is not possible at present, but Linux applications can be
ported.

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 Architecture

By the related UNIX design Mac OS X profits from the protected

memory area and established preemptive multitasking. The Kernel
consists of 5 components. Included are the Mach Microkernel with the
BSD subsystem, file system, network ability and the I/O Kit. The file
system supports file names with up to 255 characters and unicode. The
Mach Micro kernel cares about the resource management like processor
performance, scheduler, memory protection and the communication
between the system layers. The core is enclosed by a specified version
of the 4.4 BSD-Lite2 Kernel and userland. This contains POSIX APIs
and abstracts the file system and the network communication. The BSD
Kernel takes care for the administration of system processes and security
policies and threading of program parts for Mac OS X.
The I/O Kit introduced with Darwin is a object-oriented development
software which provides the resources for the development of driver
software with the support of SMP and preemptive multitasking.

The project OpenDarwin was founded in 2002 with the goal to provide
a development environment for the Mac OS X source code and to
develop a Darwin derivate. The new created community is a test
platform for bug fixes as well as new functions for Mac Os X and
Darwin that Apple integrate into the official source code.
At 2006-07-25 the OpenDarwin team and the administrators announced
the termination of this project. For reason the failure of the reaching of
the goals was named. The project involved more to a host for Mac Os X
project than to a development platform.

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 Kernel
Darwin is built around XNU (XNU is the computer operating system
kernel that Apple Inc. acquired and developed for use in the Mac OS X
operating system and released as free and open source software as part
of the Darwin operating system. XNU is an acronym for X is Not Unix.),
a hybrid kernel that combines the Mach 3 microkernel, various elements
of BSD (including the process model, network stack, and virtual file
system), and an object-oriented device driver API called I/O Kit. BSD is
Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD, sometimes called Berkeley Unix)
is the Unix operating system derivative developed and distributed by the
Computer Systems Research Group of the University of California,
Berkeley, from 1977 to 1995.

Some of the benefits of this choice of kernel are the Mach-O [Mach-O,
short for Mach object file format, is a file format for executables, object
code, shared libraries, dynamically-loaded code, and core dumps] binary
format, which allows a single executable file (including the kernel itself)
to support multiple CPU architectures, and the mature support for
symmetric multiprocessing in Mach. The hybrid kernel design
compromises between the flexibility of a microkernel and the
performance of a monolithic kernel. [A monolithic kernel is a kernel
architecture where the entire kernel is run in kernel space in supervisor
mode]

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 Hardware and software support

Darwin currently includes support for both 32-bit and 64-bit variants of
the PowerPC and Intel x86 processors used in the Mac and Apple TV as
well as the 32-bit ARM processor used in the iPhone and iPod Touch.

It supports the POSIX API by way of its BSD lineage and a large
number of programs written for various other UNIX-like systems can be
compiled on Darwin with no changes to the source code

Darwin and Mac OS X both use I/O Kit for their drivers and therefore
support the same hardware, file systems, and so forth. Apple's
distribution of Darwin included proprietary (binary-only) drivers for
their AirPort wireless cards.

Darwin does not include many of the defining elements of Mac OS X,

such as the Carbon and Cocoa APIs or the Quartz Compositor [Quartz
Compositor is the windowing system in Mac OS X.] and Aqua user
interface (Aqua is the graphical user interface and primary visual theme
of Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X operating system. It is based around the
theme of water, as its name suggests, with droplet-like elements and
liberal use of translucency and reflection effects), and thus cannot run
Mac applications. It does, however, support a number of lesser known
features of Mac OS X, such as mDNSResponder, which is the multicast
DNS responder and a core component of the Bonjour networking
technology, and launchd, an advanced service management framework.

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 License
In July 2003, Apple released Darwin under version 2.0 of the Apple
Public Source License (APSL) (The Apple Public Source License is the
open source and free software license under which Apple's Darwin
operating system was released. A free software and open source license
was voluntarily adopted to further involve the community from which
much of Darwin originated.) , which the Free Software Foundation
(FSF) approved as a free software license. Previous releases had taken
place under an earlier version of the APSL that did not meet the FSF's
definition of free software, although it met the requirements of the Open
Source Definition.

Mascot
The Darwin developers decided to adopt a mascot in 2000, and chose
Hexley the Platypus, over other contenders, such as an Aqua Darwin
fish, Clarus the Dogcow, and an orca. Hexley is a cartoon platypus who
usually wears a cap resembling a demon's horns. He carries a trident,
similar to the BSD Daemon, to symbolize the daemon's forking of
processes. Hexley was designed and copyrighted by Jon Hooper; Apple
does not sanction Hexley as a logo for Darwin.

The name was a mistake: it was originally supposed to be named after

Thomas Henry Huxley, a 19th century English biologist who was a
well-known champion of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution (nick-
named "Darwin's bulldog"); however, ignorance led not only to a
mistake in Huxley's name but who he was (the developers apparently
thought he was simply Darwin's assistant, when in fact he was a
prominent biologist in his own right). By the time the mistake had been
discovered, however, it was deemed too late to change and the incorrect
name "Hexley" was kept.

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Releases
This is a table of major Darwin releases with their dates of release and
their corresponding Mac OS X releases. Note that the corresponding
Mac OS X release may have been released on a different date; refer to
the Mac OS X pages for those dates.

Versi Release Correspond Features and changes

on date ing
numb releases
er
0.1 March Mac OS X
16, 1999 Server 1.0
1.0 April 5, Mac OS X
2000 DP4 (Darwin
1.0.2)
1.2.1 Novemb Mac OS X
er 15, Public Beta
2000
1.3.1 April 13, Mac OS X
2001 v10.0
1.4.1 October Mac OS X Performance improvements
2, 2001 v10.1 to "boot time, real-time
threads, thread management,
cache flushing, and
preemption handling,"
support for SMB network file
system, Wget replaced with
cURL.
6.0.1 Septemb Mac OS X GCC upgraded from 2 to 3.1,
er 23, v10.2 IPv6 and IPSec support,
2002 (Darwin mDNSResponder service
6.0.2) discovery daemon
(Rendezvous), addition of

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 CUPS, Ruby, and Python,
journaling support in HFS+
(Darwin 6.2), application
profiles ("pre-heat files") for
faster program launching
7.0 October Mac OS X BSD layer synchronized with
24, 2003 v10.3 FreeBSD 5, automatic file
defragmentation, hot-file
clustering, and optional case
sensitivity in HFS+, bash
instead of tcsh as default
shell, read-only NTFS support
(Darwin 7.9).
8.0 April 29, Mac OS X Stable kernel programming
2005 v10.4 interface, finer-grained kernel
Mac OS X for locking, 64-bit BSD layer,
Apple TV launchd service management
(Darwin framework, extended file
8.8.2) attributes, access control
lists, commands such as cp
and mv updated to preserve
extended attributes and
resource forks.[10]
9.0 October iPhone OS Full POSIX compliance,
26, 2007 1.0 (Darwin improved hierarchical process
9.0.0d1) scheduling model,
Mac OS X dynamically allocated swap
v10.5 files, dynamic resource limits
(for files and processes),
process sandboxing, address
space layout randomization,
DTrace tracing framework,
file system events daemon,
directory hard links, Apache
1.3 and PHP 4 updated to
Apache 2.2 and PHP 5, read-
only ZFS support.

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 Derived projects
Due to the free software nature of Darwin, there are many projects that
aim to modify or enhance the operating system. One of them is as
follows

OpenDarwin

GNOME running on OpenDarwin.

OpenDarwin was a community-led operating system based on the

Darwin platform. It was founded in April 2002 by Apple Inc. and
Internet Systems Consortium. Its goal was to increase collaboration
between Apple developers and the free software community. Apple
theoretically benefited from the project because improvements to
OpenDarwin would be incorporated into Darwin releases; and the
free/open source community supposedly benefited from being given

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complete control over its own operating system, which could then be
used in free software distributions such as GNU-Darwin.

On July 25, 2006, the OpenDarwin team announced that the project was
shutting down, as they felt OpenDarwin had "become a mere hosting
facility for Mac OS X related projects," and that the efforts to create a
standalone Darwin operating system had failed. They also state:
"Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives,
difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the
community have all contributed to this." The last stable release was
version 7.2.1, released on July 16, 2004.

Mach
Mach is at the heart of Darwin because it provides some of the most
critical functions of the operating system. Much of what Mach provides
is transparent to applications. It manages processor resources such as
CPU usage and memory, handles scheduling, enforces memory
protection, and implements a messaging-centered infrastructure for
untyped interprocess communication, both local and remote. Mach
provides many important advantages to Macintosh computing:

• Protected memory. The stability of an operating system should

not depend on all executing applications being good citizens. Even
a well-behaved process can accidentally write data into the address
space of the system or another process, which can result in the loss
or corruption of data or even precipitate system crashes. Mach
ensures that an application cannot write in another application’s
memory or in the operating system’s memory. By walling off
applications from each other and from system processes, Mach
makes it virtually impossible for a single poorly behaved
application to damage the rest of the system. Best of all, if an
application crashes as the result of its own misbehavior, the crash
affects only that application and not the rest of the system.

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 • Preemptive multitasking. With Mach, processes share the CPU
efficiently. Mach watches over the computer’s processor,
prioritizing tasks, making sure activity levels are at the maximum,
and ensuring that every task gets the resources it needs. It uses
certain criteria to decide how important a task is and therefore how
much time to allocate to it before giving another task its turn. Your
process is not dependent on another process yielding its processing
time.
• Advanced virtual memory. In Mac OS X, virtual memory is “on”
all the time. The Mach virtual memory system gives each process
its own private virtual address space. For 32-bit applications, this
virtual address space is 4 GB. For 64-bit applications, the
theoretical maximum is approximately 18 exabytes, or 18 billion
billion bytes. Mach maintains address maps that control the
translation of a task’s virtual addresses into physical memory.
Typically only a portion of the data or code contained in a task’s
virtual address space resides in physical memory at any given
time. As pages are needed, they are loaded into physical memory
from storage. Mach augments these semantics with the abstraction
of memory objects. Named memory objects enable one task (at a
sufficiently low level) to map a range of memory, unmap it, and
send it to another task. This capability is essential for
implementing separate execution environments on the same
system.
• Real-time support. This feature guarantees low-latency access to
processor resources for time-sensitive media applications.

Mach also enables cooperative multitasking, preemptive threading, and

cooperative threading.

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 Device-Driver Support

Darwin offers an object-oriented framework for developing device

drivers called the I/O Kit framework. This framework facilitates the
creation of drivers for Mac OS X and provides much of the
infrastructure that they need. It is written in a restricted subset of C++.
Designed to support a range of device families, the I/O Kit is both
modular and extensible.

Device drivers created with the I/O Kit acquire several important
features:

• True plug and play

• Dynamic device management (“hot plugging”)
• Power management (for both desktops and portables)

If your device conforms to standard specifications, such as those for

mice, keyboards, audio input devices, modern MIDI devices, and so on,
it should just work when you plug it in. If your device doesn’t conform
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to a published standard, you can use the I/O Kit resources to create a
custom driver to meet your needs. Devices such as AGP cards, PCI and
PCIe cards, scanners, and printers usually require custom drivers or
other support software in order to work with Mac OS X.

BSD
Integrated with Mach is a customized version of the Berkeley Software
Distribution (BSD) operating system (currently FreeBSD 5). Darwin’s
implementation of BSD includes much of the POSIX API, which
higher-level applications can also use to implement basic application
features. BSD serves as the basis for the file systems and networking
facilities of Mac OS X. In addition, it provides several programming
interfaces and services, including:

• The process model (process IDs, signals, and so on)

• Basic security policies such as file permissions and user and group
IDs
• Threading support (POSIX threads)
• Networking support (BSD sockets)

File-System Support
The file-system component of Darwin is based on extensions to BSD
and an enhanced Virtual File System (VFS) design. The file-system
component includes the following features:

• Permissions on removable media. This feature is based on a

globally unique ID registered for each connected removable device
(including USB and FireWire devices) in the system.
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 • Access control lists (available in Mac OS X version 10.4 and later)
• URL-based volume mount, which enables users (via a Finder
command) to mount such things as AppleShare and web servers
• Unified buffer cache, which consolidates the buffer cache with the
virtual-memory cache
• Long filenames (255 characters or 755 bytes, based on UTF-8)
• Support for hiding filename extensions on a per-file basis
• Journaling of all file-system types to aid in data recovery after a
crash

Network configuration in Darwin

For Darwin, the default configuration mechanism, and the officially

recommended way, is to edit the files as described below.

In Darwin, network devices are referred to by a short name followed by

a number. The number starts with zero and increases as more network
interfaces of the same type are detected. Some short names used in
Darwin are "en" (ethernet devices), "lo" (loopback interface), "ppp"
(PPP and, post-darwin-1.3.1, PPPoE), and "pppoe" (PPPoE, pre-darwin-
5.1).

There are 3 places network configuration information is stored.

• /etc/iftab is the interface configuration file. This is

where you set information regarding a specific
interface.
• /etc/hostconfig is a general host configuration file.
This is where the default router is set.
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 • NetInfo: your nameservice configuration resides in
NetInfo under Darwin.

Networking Extensions
Darwin offers kernel developers a technology for adding networking
capabilities to the operating system: network kernel extensions (NKEs).
The NKE facility allows you to create networking modules and even
entire protocol stacks that can be dynamically loaded into the kernel and
unloaded from it. NKEs also make it possible to configure protocol
stacks automatically.

NKE modules have built-in capabilities for monitoring and modifying

network traffic. At the data-link and network layers, they can also
receive notifications of asynchronous events from device drivers, such
as when there is a change in the status of a network interface

Scripting Support
Darwin includes all of the scripting languages commonly found in
UNIX-based operating systems. In addition to the scripting languages
associated with command-line shells (such as bash and csh), Darwin
also includes support for Perl, Python, Ruby, and others.

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In Mac OS X v10.5, Darwin added support for several new scripting
features. In addition to adding support for Ruby on Rails, Mac OS X
also added scripting bridges to the Objective-C classes of Cocoa. These
bridges let you use Cocoa classes from within your Python and Ruby
scripts.

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