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The Mac Observer Interview with Jordan Hubbard

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tmoThe folks at The Mac Observer interview Jordan Hubbard regarding his time as a founder of FreeBSD, heading Apple’s UNIX team, and his many contributions to open source. Check out the link below to listen to the podcast.

Jordan Hubbard, the co-founder of FreeBSD, spent a dozen years at Apple bringing coherence to the UNIX core of Mac OS X. Apple calls it macOS today, but in the early years, there were lots of rough spots integrating the partly FreeBSD core into a viable consumer Mac OS X. Jordan was also instrumental in modernizing Mac OS X with features like MacPorts, Launchd, Grand Central Dispatch and application sandboxing. Today, his work complete at Apple, Jordan is an open source developer. We talked about the early development of Mac OS X derived from NeXT and even the earliest BSD origins. Along the way, we also chatted about Jordan’s childhood memories as an 8-year old being an electronics geek with Radio Shack as his Mecca. If you love macOS, don’t miss this insightful historical tour.

TMO Background Mode: Interview with Open Source Developer & Former Apple Manager Jordan Hubbard

FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro

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This is a lengthy discussion from Hacker News, derived from a tutorial by user on how to get FreeBSD set up on a MacBook Pro.mac_freebsd_orig

Top comment:

> Six years later, it less and less “Just Works”, started turning into spyware and nagware, and doesn’t need much less maintenance than Linux desktop — at least for my work, which is system administration and software development, probably it is better for the mythical End User person. Work needed to get software I need running is not less obscure than work I’d need to do on Linux or othe Unix-like system…. GUI that used to be nice and unintrusive, got annoying. Either I came full circle in the last 15 years of my computer usage, or the OSX experience degraded in last 5 years.So… it’s not just me. Somewhere between Snow Leopard and Mavericks I started finding building various things from source that never were a problem became an exercise in figuring out what library had been removed or moved or what Apple had done with lib/header paths or something else.

If people aren’t going over to another unix, what are they doing? Homebrew? Container-ing or virtualizing another unix? Or just suffering?

Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13027506

Since 2008 or 2009 I work on Apple hardware and OS: back then I grew tired of Linux desktop (which is going to be MASSIVE NEXT YEAR, at least since 2001), and switched to something that Just Works. Six years later, it less and less Just Works, started turning into spyware and nagware, and doesn’t need much less maintenance than Linux desktop — at least for my work, which is system administration and software development, probably it is better for the mythical End User person. Work needed to get software I need running is not less obscure than work I’d need to do on Linux or othe Unix-like system. I am finding myself turning away from GUI programs that I used to appreciate, and most of the time I use OSX to just run a terminal, Firefox, and Emacs. GUI that used to be nice and unintrusive, got annoying. Either I came full circle in the last 15 years of my computer usage, or the OSX experience degraded in last 5 years. Again, this is from a sysadmin/developer kind of power user perspective; power user, whose definition of “fun” includes spending 6 hours in the middle of the night figuring how to get dual boot working with UEFI.

Original tutorial: https://gist.github.com/mpasternacki/974e29d1e3865e940c53

Apple releases macOS 10.12 Sierra Darwin source code

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The developers of Apple have released the Darwin source code for macOS 10.12 Sierra. Darwin comprises of the kernel, BSD portions, drivers, and developer tools. The source code can be found at the links provided.

macossourceThe lowest layers of macOS, including the kernel, BSD portions, and drivers are based mainly on open source technologies, collectively called Darwin. As such, Apple provides download links to the latest versions of these technologies for the open source community to learn and to use.

Source code: https://opensource.apple.com/release/os-x-1012.html

Original post: https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/24/apple-releases-macos-10-12-sierra-open-source-darwin-code/

A ZFS developer’s analysis of Apple’s new APFS file system (arstechnica.com)

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ZFS developer Adam H. Leventhal writes an in-depth comparison between ZFS–a prominent filesystem in BSD systems, and APFS–a new filesystem developed for Apple’s macOS and replacing its aging HFS+. The author discusses its snapshot and backup, management, performance, efficiency, and data integrity features.

zfsapfs
APFS, the Apple File System, was itself started in 2014 with Giampaolo as its lead engineer. It’s a stand-alone, from-scratch implementation (an earlier version of this post noted a dependency on Core Storage, but Giampaolo set me straight in this comment). I asked him about looking for inspiration in other modern file systems such as BSD’s HAMMER, Linux’s btrfs, or OpenZFS (Solaris, illumos, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, Ubuntu Linux, etc.), all of which have features similar to what APFS intends to deliver. (And note that Apple built a fairly complete port of ZFS, though Giampaolo was not apparently part of the group advocating for it.) Giampaolo explained that he was aware of them as a self-described file system guy (he built the file system in BeOS, unfairly relegated to obscurity when Apple opted to purchase NeXTSTEP instead), but didn’t delve too deeply for fear, he said, of tainting himself.

Full article: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/06/a-zfs-developers-analysis-of-the-good-and-bad-in-apples-new-apfs-file-system/

Discussion thread on /r/programming: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4pziho/a_zfs_developers_analysis_of_apples_new_apfs_file/t1_d4pw7vc