On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 4:08 AM, Anant Narayanan <anant@kix.in> wrote:

On Sep 11, 2009, at 10:36 PM, Roman V Shaposhnik wrote:

I still do care very much (and in fact, I've been meaning
to provide some of the answers on this mailing list, but
apparently one can't upgrade to Snow Leopard over the
net so I have to physically drive to the Mac store :-().

Anyway, for a non Mac person, can somebody please clarify
whether macosforge.org has the very same bits that go into
the Mac OS itself, or do I still have to get the real thing?

The source as put on macosforge has been "generalized" (apparently to make it easy to port to other platforms), but AFAIK the code that actually runs in Snow Leopard has a few "performance optimizations" that takes advantage of a similar low-level API that is supported by the new xnu kernel.

My understanding is it's the same source on macosforge, it can just be built with or without the kernel hints. (They're part of the kqueues stuff, and that's being ported to FreeBSD as well).

The xnu kernel itself is also open-source, http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-1456.1.26/ is the version with GCD primitives.

--
Anant