User:Lielei~enwiki/AppleOLDFAQ

Apple - historical lie:

I remember there were discussions between around 2002-2003 in opendarwin mailing list(which cannot be retrieved today:

http://web.archive.org/web/20030101000000-20050101235959/http://www.opendarwin.org/pipermail/discuss.mbox/discuss.mbox

this page cannot be retrieved

http://developer.apple.com/darwin/news/qa20010927.html#x86

but fortunately there are guys saved it:

http://edu.stuccess.com/knowcenter/FreeBSD/discuss/00000012.htm

http://boards.slackercentral.com/archive/index.php/t-45014.html

http://www.opensource.apple.com/news/qa20010927.html#x86

Darwin and Security

Q: I have been wondering how much of your efforts are placed upon security of the operating system. I know that Linux and Windows have had a multitude of security exploits. Is there a push to fix security holes?

A: Apple is dedicated to the security of Mac OS X, which includes Darwin and Mac OS X Server. As you realize, security is an ongoing process in which new vulnerabilities are addressed as they are found. Several of the Mac OS X Updates already released have contained patches for recently-found security vulnerabilities. We are looking into a method to make security-related patches available even faster for people who would want to apply them. As we do this, we'll need to balance the speed of releasing a patch against taking the time to ensure that it will work correctly across the wide range of possible customer configurations. Q: What is Apple doing to work with existing security notification mechanisms and augment them for disseminating security bulletins? A: For the protection of our customers, Apple does not disclose, discuss or confirm security issues until a full investigation has occurred and any necessary patches or releases are available. We work closely with the FreeBSD security team, and also with CERT and FIRST for analysis of potential security vulnerabilities. When a security update is available from Apple, we will usually contact these groups to update their security notifications about the particular vulnerability. We also have a Security-Announce mailing list for security notifications from Apple. Darwin on x86 Q: I must say that Apple is doing a really good job with their open-source strategy, and I'd like to congratulate you for trusting in the power of the community. It would be great if you could give more attention on the porting of Darwin for the x86 platform (don't let the guys who are doing that  alone!), as it will help a lot on the rapid growing of the developer base, helping the development of the system and (of course) the development of new drivers, filesystems and other important components that could be modified to work also on the PPC side. A: Thanks. Much of Darwin is processor-independent BSD code. We're using the x86 platform as an integrity-check to help us make sure that the architectural underpinnings function just as well in Darwin as in the BSD code. This is important to maintain compatibility with the ever-evolving BSD software base, and also helps us to maintain a high-quality code base through the benefits of designing for software portability. We welcome new drivers and other components to help test Darwin on the x86 platform. Q: Will Mac OS X be ported to the PC? A: There are no plans to make Mac OS X available on any non-Apple platforms. We're simply making Darwin, the underlying operating system of Mac OS X, a better system by using x86 as a test bed to ensure architectural soundness and to reap the benefits from applying portable software coding practices. Darwin Releases Q: How about doing another Darwin source CD to match Mac OS X? A: At the New York MacWorld, Steve Jobs announced Mac OS X 10.1 to ship in the September time frame. We plan to have a Darwin binary release close to the customer availability of Mac OS X 10.1. We're relying on other groups, such as BSD's Daemon News, to provide the actual CDs. We'll have further information on our open source web site as we get closer to this. In the meantime, you can download the very latest bits we have live from our open source web site. Q: How often will Mac OS X be made consistent with Darwin? How much driver support will be adopted? Mac OS X needs to support Deskwriter 500's connected by appletalk, cd writers connected by SCSI, zip drives etc. A: Mac OS X and Darwin are consistent with each other since Darwin is the core operating system of Mac OS X. You can get an up-to-date snapshot of the Darwin bits at any time from our open source web site. We tend to make binary installs of Darwin available with significant releases of Mac OS X. On the question of how much driver support will be adopted -- as much as  you can provide is the answer! Apple will develop drivers for our current and future products. We look to third-party developers and the community to provide other drivers for particular third-party devices or older hardware that we no longer support. We're looking into a central repository to register these additional drivers so that anyone can obtain them. Q: My brother is very interested in purchasing a Macintosh instead of a PC Clone running linux. The major reason that he cites for not purchasing a Mac is uncertainty regarding the ability to run X Windows applications under Darwin and OS X. Will Apple add support for X windows to OS X? A: You want it, you got it! XFree86 (http://xfree86.org) supports Darwin and Mac OS X as standard platforms. See http://sourceforge. net/projects/xonx for specific information on the status of Darwin and Mac OS X support within XFree86. Thanks very much to Darwin Committer Torrey T. Lyons for leading the effort to bring XFree86 to Mac OS X / Darwin. The XonX project at SourceForge is a collection of people interested in furthering XFree86 on Darwin and/or Mac OS X. The XonX project does not maintain a separate CVS repository and works directly from the XFree86 repository. The code submitted by XonX developers is reviewed and committed by Torrey to the XFree86 repository. The XonX project also periodically releases precompiled binary snapshots built from the XFree86 repository to get user testing of new features. (XDarwin1.0a2 is the latest such test release.) Since there are very few people in the XFree86 Project who are actively working on Darwin/Mac OS X, the XonX team provides the majority of the Darwin/Mac OS X development for XFree86. We're hoping that more of the XonX developers will join the XFree86 Project over time. The history goes something like this: XFree86 4.0.2 - The first full release of XFree86 to support Darwin in any form. This version would run only from the console and talked directly to hardware through the IOKit. XFree86 4.1.0 - The first release to support interoperability with Aqua (and thus the first of larger interest to Mac OS X users). With a key combination the user can toggle back and forth between the Aqua desktop and a full screen X11 display. XFree86 4.2.0 - Expected later this year, this will be the first release to support a true rootless mode on Mac OS X. Infrastructure -- (continued) Q: Create a dozen new email addresses. A: Bzzt -- that was not a question! However, we agree that the Darwin lists are getting a bit too much traffic to follow easily. Look for some news on this front in the near future. Q: The feedback & bug tracking mechanisms for MacOSX in general is not consistent or at least not clear from my perspective. Especially considering that the Darwin/Open Source site has it's own feedback/bug track system at http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/bugs.html and then there's the other feedback mechanism at http://www.apple. com/macosx/feedback/. The main point is that there are two mechanisms as a user and developer for me to "talk back" with. Is there a difference? A: The feedback site is designed for collecting general user comments, which is used to identify major issues. Developers who are capable of providing more detailed critiques of specific problems should use the bug tracking mechanisms, which allows individual responses. Both Darwin and the Apple Developer Connection allow developers to file bugs into Radar, the system used internally by Apple Engineering.