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Concept
XNU
Summary
XNU is the computer operating system (OS) kernel developed at Apple Inc. since December 1996 for use in the Mac OS X (now macOS) operating system and released as free and open-source software as part of the Darwin OS, which in addition to macOS is also the basis for the Apple TV Software, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, visionOS, and tvOS OSes. XNU is an abbreviation of X is Not Unix.
Originally developed by NeXT for the NeXTSTEP operating system, XNU was a hybrid kernel derived from version 2.5 of the Mach kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University, which incorporated the bulk of the 4.3BSD kernel modified to run atop Mach primitives, along with an application programming interface (API) in Objective-C for writing drivers named Driver Kit.
After Apple acquired NeXT, the kernel was updated with code derived from OSFMK 7.3 from OSF, and the FreeBSD project, and the Driver Kit was replaced with new API on a restricted subset of C++ (based on Embedded C++) named I/O Kit.
XNU is a hybrid kernel, containing features of both monolithic kernels and microkernels, attempting to make the best use of both technologies, such as the message passing ability of microkernels enabling greater modularity and larger portions of the OS to benefit from memory protection, and retaining the speed of monolithic kernels for some critical tasks.
XNU runs on ARM64 and x86-64 processors, both one processor and symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) models. PowerPC support was removed as of the version in Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Support for IA-32 was removed as of the version in Mac OS X Lion; support for 32-bit ARM was removed as of the version in iOS 11.
Mach (kernel)
The basis of the XNU kernel is a heavily modified (hybrid) Open Software Foundation Mach kernel (OSFMK) 7.3. OSFMK 7.3 is a microkernel that includes applicable code from the University of Utah Mach 4 kernel and from the many Mach 3.0 variants forked from the original Carnegie Mellon University Mach 3.0 microkernel.
OSFMK 7.
Official source
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