Some questions about Darwin

[Zaid]

I had a couple of questions about Darwin that i was hoping someone out there could answer.

Which file systems does Darwin allow one to mount? Also does it provide you with full read-write support or is it a read-only mount?

I was particularly wondering about NTFS, fat32 and ext3.

Also how easy is it to recompile and replace darwin on a max os x box? this probably isn't as neccesary as on other systems, but on linux i used to recompile the kernel and strip out unneccessary stuff (support for hardware I didnt have) . It would speed up my system (boot time especially). how easy is it to do this on os x. Is there a list of stuff that needs to be included etc?

Just a couple of things i was wondering about. I don't have a mac to experiment with (yet )

 

[alex_ant]

Darwin supports the following filesystems (cut & pasted from Terminal):

/sbin/mount /sbin/mount_devfs /sbin/mount_msdos /sbin/mount_udf
/sbin/mount_afp /sbin/mount_fdesc /sbin/mount_nfs /sbin/mount_volfs
/sbin/mount_cd9660 /sbin/mount_ftp /sbin/mount_smbfs /sbin/mount_webdav
/sbin/mount_cddafs /sbin/mount_hfs /sbin/mount_synthfs

No NTFS support, no ext3 support. You might want to check if there are 3rd party drivers for either of those.

I've never heard about using Mac OS X with a custom Darwin kernel. I think it would be more trouble than it would be worth. The Darwin kernel is a different design than Linux's where you can compile in support for any obscure device under the sun. There's really no reason to recompile the Darwin kernel.

 

[timbloom]

What you guys are talking about here is probably the main fundemental difference between linux and unix. Linux uses a macrokernel, where much of the system support files are built into the kernel, whereas unix uses a microkernel, with kernel extensions, .kext, to support the hardware. There is no need to update this manually.

If you want to get rid of things, go to /System/Library/Extensions/ and have at it, but watch what you do, and you really better have an idea of what you are doing, or you can ruin your install.