Home
Main website
Display Sidebar
Hide Ads
Recent Changes
View Source:
MacOSX
Edit
PageHistory
Diff
Info
LikePages
You are viewing an old revision of this page.
View the current version
.
[MacOSX] is AppleCorporation's sexy OperatingSystem, built on top of [Darwin], a [BSD] variant using a [Mach] MicroKernel. Previous notes on this page noted that OS X was amazingly slow. Indeed, this holds true to earlier releases, but a combination of new releases (each, in general, faster than the last) and newer hardware has made day to day use of Mac OS X a much more pleasant experience. Mac OS X 10.2 or "Jaguar" introducted QuartzExtreme, which used your 3D graphics card for window compositing and rendering. Doing this enabled things like alpha translucency and drop shadows (both of which Mac OS X makes extensive use of) to be used "for free". This provided a much needed speedup for GUI operations. Mac OS X 10.3, or "Panther", enhanced QuartzExtreme as well as providing a number of other speedups, finally making simple tasks like scrolling and using pull down menus bearable. "Panther" also greatly improved compatibility with Windows file sharing (using Samba 3.0) and had several significant enhancements to the BSD and GNU command line tools included. [Xcode] debuted with the release of "Panther", obsoleting the aging ProjectBuilder and adding several nice new features to the free gcc-orienteded development environment included with the OS. Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" continues to enhance performance, although many of the enhancements are not available yet. Quartz2DExtreme was to debut with "Tiger", but ships disabled on all Macs. It takes acceleration on the graphics card one step further by using programmable shaders to render GUI elements. Rumour has it it will be enabled in a future "Tiger" point release. Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" will be revealed at WWDC in June 2006. It is unknown whether system calls like sigaction() still perform terribly compared to their Linux counterparts, but it has become increasingly clear that the UNIX subsystem in OS X is more of a compatiblity layer, and that by and large native OS X applications do not use POSIX system calls in any situation -- rather the POSIX system calls are more of a wrapper around others. ''I have seen articles which state that it is due to the time to create a new thread and demonstrated it through simple C programs. Can't find the article at present but find plenty of references saying [MySQL] and [Apache] are painfully slow -- IanMcDonald'' ''AFAIK It only applied to pthreads. Every app written in Carbon or Cocoa (ie, every single GUI app on OSX) uses NSThreads which doesn't seem to be painfully slow from actually using MacOSX. Incidentally, my 1.4Ghz Mac Mini kicks the crap out of my Celeron 1.1GHz PC when benchmarking MySQL, which other benchmarks would have you believe that's not possible, so it can't be _that_ bad :P. Also, some have attributed the slowness in MySQL to the fact that InnoDB uses fcntl() to guarantee data has been written to disk instead of fsync(). See http://lists.apple.com/archives/darwin-dev/2005/Feb/msg00072.html -- PhilMurray'' Note: the Ⅹ in [MacOSX] has nothing to do with the X windowing system, it is the roman numeral for 10, which follows on from the previous version [MacOS] 9. ! See also: * [The history of MacOS X, and what exactly it is | http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/] ----- Part of CategoryOperatingSystem
49 pages link to
MacOSX
:
MacOS
Gershwin
ClamAV
PortabilityNotes
InterOperability
MacFanatic
OpenOffice.org
X11ForMacOSX
TheGIMP
Quartz
QuartzExtreme
JonPurvis
Cocoa
Safari
Mail
VideoLanClient
IPP
GreenStone
Audacity
Darwin
CarstenKlapp
SteveJobs
NFSOnMacOSX
NeXT
MacSambaNotes
DickSmithElectronicsComputerExpo
MozillaCamino
Gecko
LinuxIsNotWindows
AdobePhotoshop
CIFS
JabberClients
SANE
OperatingSystem
MozillaFirefox
SCons
Carbon
DeBugging
JimCheetham
CreatingPDFs
PPCNotes
Tremulous
Perl
SuperUser
LinuxEquivalentsForWindowsSoftware
BerkeleySoftwareDistribution
POSIX
MakefileHowto
AppleMacintosh