Submitted by OSAlert regular Kaiwai, who we all love and hate at the same time, has written a fairly detailed article about the latest Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard build, seed 10A355. He covers the changes made, the status of the transition to 64bit, and more.
It was already leaked that Snow Leopard seeds are now API complete, but according to Kaiwai, many people misunderstood as to what this actually meant. “The first misreporting was that it means, “this is stable and all builds from here will be testing” which is 100% patently wrong,” he writes. Obviously, API complete simply means that from here on out, both Apple itself and 3rd party developers can start making use of the new and changed APIs comfortably knowing that the APIs will no longer change. They’re now a fixed target instead of a moving target, and that’s very important for developers.
Kaiwai presented his overview of the Snow Leopard seed as a straightforward bullet list, and a few of those stood out to me. First of all, he did some small tests to validate backwards compatibility, and as it turns out, the few applications he ran had no problems running, such as Handbreak 0.9.3 to compress some videos, Office 2008, and Adium 1.3.4. Since Office 2008 is a pretty complex application, it’s good to see it works without a hitch on this new major Mac OS X release.
Being a PowerMac G4 owner, I’m obviously quite interested in how Apple is going to treat stubborn PPC people like myself: will we still be able to run Snow Leopard? Will they remove support for PowerPC entirely? Or will the move to a 64bit kernel mean that they will no longer ship a 32bit kernel, meaning only the G4 gets cut?
The general idea is that yes, PowerPC support will be dropped, since the optimisations planned in Snow Leopard provide no benefit for PowerPC users. The move to full 64bit, for instance, will only slightly slow down 64bit PowerPC G5 machines; the number of general purpose registers between 32bit and 64bit PPC is the same, so 64bit PPC code will only suffer from having to deal with larger data items.
However, that was assuming Snow Leopard only included performance improvements. There are hints that Snow Leopard might also bring user-visible improvements, and I would be saddened to see PowerPC users not getting to use those. Understandable, from Apple’s point of view, but still.
Kaiwai’s overview talks a lot about PowerPC code, and what I hear doesn’t make me very hopeful: “Within the Applications and System directory many of the services are now Intel only which include Finder.app, SystemUIServer.app,” he writes, “However, there are still components that include ppc code; although the amount in megabytes is minute I question why they are still there – will we eventually see this stripped as the development goes further on?”
The article is quite detailed, so I suggest you take a look at it if you’re interested in where Snow Leopard is going.
I thought we only hate him
Besides, I don’t understand..when I wrote about first RC release of Wine 1.0 you dismissed it on the basis that you don’t want to publish articles about non-finished products, yet here it is, yet another article about Snow Leopard.
Now now, that’s not nice.
Well, I’m not an editor here or anything… but, strictly speaking, Wine isn’t an os and OS X is. Perhaps that came into play…? Technically, Wine is an emulator.
Wine Is Not an Emulator…
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Best chuckle of the day, chapeau! Well played sir…
Well, they can have all the recursive acronyms they want… but it is most certainly an emulator. It provides a subset of Windows APIs such that a good number of Windows apps will run. It emulates the Windows APIs and system calls to accomplish this… therefore, it is an emulator–not a device emulator as that is unnecessary, but a software emulator none the less.
before Apple start’s sending out the cease and decist letters and forces Kaiwai to take it down.
I’ve been refreshing my browser like crazy hoping that I’ll be graced with the presence of a ‘cease and desist’ but alas nothing has occurred. With that being said, given that I provided no links to torrents, no screenshots and the fact I am not talking about anything that is particularly ‘new’ – it would be a difficult thing to try and shut me down.
I see in the article there is a new verison of DVD player. Does anyone know if it has new features or can play any new formats?
The DVD framework has been upgraded from 4.0 to 5.2.0 – I haven’t noticed any differences by way of formats supported. I doubt they’re going to make a leap to BluRay anytime soon given that Apple has banked a lot on the idea of movies being distributed online – however that vision might hit a snag if certain internet service provides think it is good business practice to fleece their customers through expensive tiered service (I’m not against tiered bandwidth allowances by matter of principle, I just find that current arrangement is detached from what one would deem balanced).
I don’t call it detailed. In fact, the article is full of ‘i guess’, ‘i wonder’, ‘i’m confused’, ‘if’, ‘maybe’ and just guess works of just a guy. I hope the word ‘detailed’ doesn’t mean ‘amount of characters’ in the article.
Basically you don’t find anything in the article but some guy’s weekend experience as an average heavy user. He keeps on talking about file size of a bundle, ppc code still floating around and a few inconsistencies (and for sake, this is far from the release version…) He probably doesn’t know CUPS was bought by Apple too. And what is up with the 64bit addict of this guy? Does the world fail if the flash plugin doesn’t become 64 bit? Sounds like Apple is ironing out what’s important and leaving out ppc code around where it doesn’t matter and can be stripped whenever they like.
Summary is, this guy got disappointed by this internal beta version, because
– Not everything is 64bit
– Not every binary is intel only
– No new cool eye candies from the user’s perspective (even we know Snow Leopard is more for the internal changes).
– He doesn’t understand why some kernel extensions exist and why some extensions got bigger for the reason he doesn’t understand
– OS is not consistently optimized enough even if it is BETA.
– Installer finished with installing 9GB instead of the claimed 10GB.
Cease and desist of the article? Shoot away, got the summary here =p
i’d agree that kawai doesn’t seem to know enough about the innards of osx to draw enlightening conclusions from the stuff he sees. neither do i, but maybe somebody here can answer the questions which kawai asked? you don’t even need to break your nda, kawai did that part for you!
for example, why would you compile stuff (kexts & even apps) for ppc and arm if you don’t intend to ship snow leopard for that platforms? do you need them to compile apps for other platforms? or to simulate ppc & arm?
wouldn’t device drivers like the one for the gma-gpus have to be in 64 bit to be able to use the 64 kernel? (ok, my question)
one question which i think i can answer: there is (and already was?) a 64-bit carbon framework because only the carbon-gui framework won’t be ported to 64-bit.
It could simply be that as the product is unfinished, the various builds they are doing include extra architectures added for testing. A developer may have accidentally included an ARM binary because earlier they were testing the same library on the iPhone and forgot to untick the box to remove ARM from the desktop build.
The PPC stuff is interesting though. We really don^aEURTMt know where this is going. John Gruber stated quite clearly PPC was out, and Snow Leopard will be Intel only. It will be interesting if he^aEURTMs wrong as he rarely makes an assertion that isn^aEURTMt at least certain.
PPC code might be there for Rosetta to work properly with ppc apps. You can’t use a ppc plugin for an app on an intel binary. The app and the plugin have to be executed on the same architecture. I guess this would allow to continue using ppc plugins for certain programs.
This may all be totally wrong.
EDIT:
Reading the article I found out that that’s Kawai’s guess too.
Edited 2009-05-22 09:39 UTC
I never claimed I was a guru of Mac OS X or Information Technology, I was just expecting that maybe some more knowledgeable people might be able to fill me in on the blanks. I have a very limited understanding of MacOS X but I am reading and filling in my knowledge but I would hope that a dialogue can be discussed about some of the already disclosed underlying technologies and how that compares to Leopard 10.5.
I understand there are things yet to change but I am disappointed in that x3100 and 950 are the only two graphics drivers not yet 64bit; I would have thought they would have done something like that first before moving to move complex drivers.
Ask Debian that seeing as Shorewall isn’t enabled by default.
Or you could step back, think for just a moment and realize that the firewall can be customized and should be customized by the administrator of the system, tested and then enabled from then on.
Regarding Finder.app: It’s been Carbon since 10 was released. With the long overdue move to a pure Cocoa [NeXTSTEP] platform the Finder.app can be rewritten and be the center piece that WorkspaceManager.app was for NeXTSTEP/Openstep.
Too bad it took 11 years.