Newbie- Keeping up with kernel development
Newbie- Keeping up with kernel development
- Subject: Newbie- Keeping up with kernel development
- From: "Walter Hop" <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 30 Jan 2003 12:47:28 +0100 (CET)
Hi all,
recently I "switched" my Intel desktop to Mac OS X. Coming from a FreeBSD
background, the first thing I did was google for the way to checkout and
build the Mach kernel from a latest snapshot. I carried out the procedure
at
http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/documentation/howto/html/Building_XNU.html
to build a new kernel on my Mac OS X desktop, but this raised a few
questions.
1) The documentation on building your own mach_kernel seems a bit sparse,
it felt a bit unsupported. Is it even considered useful to track the
kernel on a Mac OS X box? Is there a mailinglist specifically for people
doing this?
2) I checked out the source using 'cvs co -r Apple-201-5' as in the
(mildly dated) HOWTO. This seemed to get me 6.2 which was to be expected
from the old tag, so I tried 'cvs co -r HEAD xnu' to get a recent version.
Strangely enough, this also looked like an older version than the regular
/mach_kernel 6.3 that is supplied with Mac OS X 10.2.3:
rez:src> strings xnu-HEAD/BUILD/obj/RELEASE_PPC/mach_kernel | grep "6\.3"
rez:src> strings xnu-HEAD/BUILD/obj/RELEASE_PPC/mach_kernel | grep "6\.2"
'com.apple.kernel' = '6.2';
'com.apple.kernel.bsd' = '6.2';
'com.apple.kernel.iokit' = '6.2';
[...]
rez:src> strings /mach_kernel | grep "6\.3"
'com.apple.kernel' = '6.3';
'com.apple.kernel.bsd' = '6.3';
'com.apple.kernel.iokit' = '6.3';
[...]
I'd rather not run an older kernel than the stock kernel, does anyone have
any information on how to get recent sources from CVS? Is there a
STABLE-ish tag to test new stuff but stay exempt from too much breakage?
:) Is it also possible to build the userland tools?
3) Most boot loaders such as FreeBSD's boot2 give you the option to boot a
different kernel image by interrupting with some key. How can I save
myself in Mac OS X on PPC hardware when I happen to boot into an invalid
kernel? I found some info using a serial console, but that seems like a
bit overkill...
4) I already have found a few gripes (mostly in mount_smbfs) that I can
document fairly well, although I don't know enough about the kernel to
create patches. What is the recommended procedure to report these
half-hearted bug reports?
Thanks in advance for the info :)
walter
--
Walter Hop <email@hidden> | +31 6 24452020 |
http://www.skydancer.nl/
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