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I have a feeling this post is going to turn into more of a rant than anything.  Today I went searching for some documentation regarding the TCP/IP stack capabilities of the MacOS and that of Linux.  I could not find a piece of decent documentation to save my life.  All I could find was either high level marketing crap or whitepapers telling me how I could add custom networking extensions to the exisiting network infrastructure of the various OSs I researched.  How on earth do you know if you need to build a kernel extension if there is not clear docs explaining the current functionality of the networking infrastructure?  The apple website is especially bad for this.  There is a lot of docs saying the networking support is excellent, however, there are no whitepapers to say what protocols, RFCs etc the various kernel level stacks support.  Generally I am not a big fan of MS documentation but in this respect they are by far the leader.  Within 5 minutes I had found a single whitepaper outlining all the data I wanted.  The moral of the story is..... please please please if you are going to post marketing hype about functionality please post the low level details to back up your “talk”.

posted on Friday, May 14, 2004 8:37 PM

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# RE: The lack of good networking documentation 5/15/2004 11:12 AM jason@jasonkemp.ca (Jason Kemp)
Mac is notorius for extremely lousy docuementation of their products. They have the arrogance to assume that it's perfect and everyone will know how to use it, so that no one will ever have to go digging into the plunbing like you are. Mac is based on FreeBSD, I think. It's BSD something, that might help you find something. I assume Apple rewrote some of it. But it's essentially a UNIX.

Documentation for Linux is spotty, I assume, since developers hate documentation. :)

# re: The lack of good networking documentation 5/15/2004 12:24 PM Mike Flasko
Your right the mac os is based on FreeBSD. It is version 4.4 specifically with a mixture of Mach. The final version is called Darwin. I got that far but that doesnt help much :(

# re: The lack of good networking documentation 6/1/2004 7:46 AM Xeno
Linux documentation is usually very very good. You just have to find which project handles TCP/IP

And yes, MAC is based on FreeBSD and in fact, the creator of FreeBSD and maintainer of the codebase now works for Apple.

I highly suggest starting here (http://www.kernel.org/) and posting to the mailing list any questions you might have.

# re: The lack of good networking documentation 12/19/2004 4:12 AM True H.
Actually, Mac OS X is based upon Mach, which is an extreme modification of BSD. Mach is a Microkernel, while BSD is a Monolithic Kernel.

# re: The lack of good networking documentation 12/19/2004 10:23 AM Mike Flasko
From what I gathered that is a partial truth. OS X is built apon Mach yet some pieces of the stack are pure BSD. For example, take a look at the data link layer on their stack.

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