82 pointsby tosh5 hours ago3 comments
  • trueno3 hours ago
    interesting. id love an eclecticlight breakdown of this. they're one of the few if only that write anything worth reading on apple hardware, i once found a QOS/scheduler insight through those guys when I couldn't get my c/cpp project pinned to the cores I wanted on m-series. https://eclecticlight.co/m1-macs/
  • cadamsdotcom3 hours ago
    > The XNU kernel runs on a variety of platforms

    This is fascinating, would love to know where it’s used! (Besides macOS)

    • csb63 hours ago
      I believe it means Apple's other hardware platforms (phones, tablets, smart TVs, VR headsets, smartwatches)
      • 39 minutes ago
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    • LoganDarkan hour ago
      It's used in iOS as well. iOS runs in some unexpected places, like for example Studio Display. Also, the Apple Lightning Digital AV Adapter runs Darwin (because RTKit didn't exist yet).
    • electronsoup3 hours ago
      Perhaps they mean ISAs
      • xphos2 hours ago
        Well x86 at one point, arm both the 32 and 64 bit versions. I think they had RISCV support in their source tree at one point but not really at a commercial level. It does cover a lot different levels of hardware though
        • wimlan hour ago
          PPC32/64 of course, and for a long time Darwin still contained remnants of its predecessor's support for SPARC, PA-RISC, and m68k.
        • kjs326 minutes ago
          Is mc68k or PPC still in there anywhere?
      • LoganDarkan hour ago
        IIRC, Apple uses 'platform' to refer to an SoC integration. For example, M1, M2 and etc. are separate platforms. M5 in Vision Pro is a separate platform than M5 in MacBook Pro. I believe Apple's XNU does somewhat still support non-Apple Silicon as well though.
        • fragmedean hour ago
          Yeah they're was that whole x86 thing thru did for quite a while.
  • almoni3 hours ago
    Does this contribute to macOS's suitability for DAW applications or is that more the baked in low-latency audio drivers?
    • dcrazyan hour ago
      Audio actually runs on a dedicated realtime thread. This used to be scheduled differently, but nowadays it might be implemented by the FIXPRI bucket described in this document.
    • bigyabai2 hours ago
      CoreAudio probably deserves most of the credit, there. Similar ASIO-style solutions like JACK, DirectSound and now Pipewire hit the sub-30ms mark without any big scheduler tweaks.