The performance of computer hardware typically increases monotonically with time. Even if the same could be said of software, the rate at which software performance improves is usually very slow compared to that of hardware. In fact, many might opine that there is plenty of software whose performance has deteriorated consistently with time. Moreover, it [...]
There has been great hue and cry over the recently found “URL exploits” in Mac OS X. I briefly looked at this issue today. While it’s certainly a worrisome situation, in my opinion there seems to be more confusion than necessary (which amounts to a very normal situation in such cases!)
I have a few things [...]
hfsdebug can go through the volume allocation bitmap and calculate a list of free extents, along with their sizes, on a volume. Thus, you could determine the size(s) of the largest free space chunk(s) on your volume. A popular name for this appears to be “free space fragmentation”.
Although hsfdebug could quantify free space fragmentation earlier, [...]
I had been wondering for a while as to how well the combination of Panther and HFS+ stands up to fragmentation. According to Apple, there should be so little fragmentation in a typical use-case scenario that you don’t even need to worry about it. I have seen several discussions on this topic in the Mac [...]
A History of Apple’s Operating Systems discusses operating systems that Apple has created in the past, and many that it tried to create, including some technologies that eventually led to Mac OS X. Goals of the document include better understanding the reasons, and wherever possible, the rationale behind Mac OS X and its important components. [...]
I finally got around to putting together some random notes on virtualization, virtual machines, etc. into a document (An Introduction to Virtualization). It might be useful as a starting point for doing stuff in this area.
/dev/blog is Kernelthread.com’s blog. It will primarily be a summary page for recent important additions (articles, news, source code, etc.) to the web site. Consequently I do not expect to update this blog very frequently.
Update: /dev/blog has migrated to osxbook.com, where it lives as a new blog.