[Ti] Powerbook MacIntel... could be, could be... what do you think?

[Chris Olson]

On Nov 17, 2005, at 8:40 AM, Loren wrote:

> MacOS was euthanized and we upgraded to FreeBSD, a system that was  
> designed specific for i386 architecture from it's inception..

Excuse me.  Say what?  You didn't upgrade to FreeBSD anything.

You upgraded to Mach/XNU, originally hosted as additional code  
written directly into the 4.2BSD-lite (a Unix SysV derivative)  
kernel, and running on DEC-VAX.  To this very day, Mac OS X does not  
use a FreeBSD kernel.  The user space uses the FreeBSD source tree,  
but the kernel is is still Mach/XNU, and was not *designed* for  
i386.  It was ported to it.

4.3BSD-lite was the point where Berkeley Software Distribution moved  
away from VAX.  The Power 6/32 platform (Tahoe) was the top contender  
for BSD.

4.4BSD-lite Release 2, the last unencumbered commercial version of  
BSD Unix from BSDI, was the basis for the i386 port of BSD Unix,  
today called FreeBSD.  The FreeBSD source tree (Ports Collection) is  
patched and built for utilities in the Mac OS X BSD subsystem.  This  
is totally architecture independent and would run on Solaris SPARC as  
well as PowerPC or x86.

The operating system kernel is where architecture-dependent  
optimizations are made.  And frankly, both the linux and Windows  
kernels blow XNU right out of the water on kernel threading  
performance on x86.  It needs *major* work before it will ever  
compete with linux or Windows on x86 hardware with any application  
that runs many kernel threads.

PowerPC and x86 are two TOTALLY different programming worlds.  I  
would tend to wait on any Intel Mac because the first ones out the  
door are going to be buggier than a hot August night.
-- 
Chris

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