MacVault said:
I saw an
article and discussion and I'm wondering if Mach really is that bad or that much worse than the Windows kernel and if so, how easy will it be for Apple to fix. And will they indeed fix it, or just make us live with it's shortcomings? Is Mach really keeping Apple out of the enterprise market, or would Apple just not care about the enterprise anyway? What do you all think?
Mac OS has two kernels, in a way. Neither of then is "bad". On a typical BSD system the Kernel is designed very much like Linux, Solaris and other unixes and the kernel directly access the bare hardware. But on MacOSX the BSD kernel uses services provided by Mach. This de-coupling of the kernel from the bare hardware allowed the CPU to be changed ut twice now. Back when MacOS wass called "Next Step" it ran on the M68K and then Apple ported it over to PPC and then the X86. Mach hanfdles stuff like "fat binaries" (AKA "Universal") too. I think Mach als sets up Apple to tae maximum advantage of the new multi-core CPUs. It will not be long before 8-core and 16-cores are common. Sun Microsystems is shipping low cost 8-core servers today. Intel will follow I'm sure. Apple does pay a slight speed penalty for using a large monolithic kernel on top of a micro kernel but I think they buy something with it too.
Way not use MacOCS for the "Enterprise" Easy answer .... Mac OSX only runs on Applehardware and Apple does not make enterprize class hardware. What's the biggest Apple box? A quad PowerMac? The thing only has four cores and one (count them... "one") power supply and just tr and rack mount the thing.
Also MacOSX is lacking features that (say) Solaris has that are needed in an enterprise setup..
1) Lights out managment - og into a machine with a dead hard drive a dianose it, some kind of ROM based system is neeed. No one wants to drive to the office to re-boot a computer should be able to do that remotly
2) "work around" failed hardware. A dead core should not bring down the whole computer. Neither should a RAM falure nor a smoked disk drive
3) The OS shold "scale" to 8, 16 or 64 CPUs. Large DBMS systems can actually use this kind of power and no, you can't simply use racks of computers. At least not easyly
4) A service organization that can be on-site within a given number of hours. No One would build a mission critical system around a computer or OS that could not get an Apple tech on-site in 8 hours to any office location world wide. Apple simply lacks that kind of service organization. IBM, Sun and ohers do have this.
Apple does have equipment that would work fine in an office of maybe up to 100 people.