
20 Oct
2014
20 Oct
'14
6:14 a.m.
Jeffrey Brown wrote
Also I did not understand until today that while Mac is a variety of Unix, it is not a variety of Linux.
There's a bunch of POSIX (well, SuSv4) features to do with threads or scheduling that are missing in OS X. In Apple's defence, they are optional. Examples include sched_{get,set}{param,scheduler}, barriers, and spin locks. I'm sure I've forgotten some. Oh yeah, robust mutexes. Several locking functions with timeouts too. These are of course not the only differences. There are apparently quite a few things that can be done nicely in OS X using Mach facilities, but I have not yet succeeded in finding useful documentation for Mach, which has probably kept me out of more trouble than I realise.