Apple

On 09 Jan 2014, at 08:03, Phil Jordan <email@hidden> wrote:

Hi,

Yeah, the instructions on the developer site are woefully out of date.

Shantonu Sen at Apple (who also shows up on this list every now and then… hi!) publishes step-by-step instructions including precise build environment requirements, for each major release. The ones for 10.9 are here:

http://shantonu.blogspot.ca/2013/10/building-xnu-for-os-x-109-mavericks.html

You can find the older versions in the blog's archives. Those have always worked well for me - my only piece of advice is to stick to the provided OS, Xcode and other version requirements precisely. If you find yourself in some tangled web of build errors, you're probably running the wrong version of something.

In fact those build instructions got much simpler than in th past and the info in above url work well if I remember correctly.

At the end its the xnu package and the dtrace package. AvailableVersions is just a script/text file.

Before 10.9, it was possible to replicate Apple's official kernel builds pretty much exactly. In 10.9, the CPU power management stuff seems to be missing from the public sources. Previous versions had these in a closed-source kext, which loaded just fine on open source kernels. So you might find your battery life somewhat worse when running one of your own kernels.

There's more differnence between the open source ode and the shipped kernel. There's a lot of changes in the virtual memory management.

Probably to make it easier for NSA (sarcastic hint).

I find it sad that Apple doesn't publish the source of the kernel shipped but only publishes some "other" version of it.

This makes security analysis much harder.

I would thus recommend everyone who has security concerns to really compile their own kernel. I did that since several months and so far had only like 4 kernel panics. But those probably will never get fixed by Apple as the sources don't match.

References:
	>Downloading OS X 10.9 source code (From: Philip Pinkerton <email@hidden>)
	>Re: Downloading OS X 10.9 source code (From: Phil Jordan <email@hidden>)