MacOS Architecture
The macOS operating system is built on top of an XNU Kernel, which in turn incorporates large portions of the FreeBSD Kernel. This means that behind the graphical user interface, is a largely Unix compliant operating system. This is why when you open a terminal in macOS you can execute familiar Unix/Linux shell commands. This Unix like core of macOS is called Darwin. Darwin is also the core of iOS, watchOS, tvOS, audioOS, visionOS, bridgeOS and iPadOS. This means that what you learn about macOS will largely be transferrable to other Apple devices.
Darwin uses the aforementioned XNU kernel. XNU (an acronym for “X is Not Unix”) was developed originally by NeXT for the NeXTSTEP operating system. XNU uses a hybrid kernel approach ...
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