June 2006
Intermediate to advanced
1680 pages
38h 43m
English
Content preview from Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach
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Appendix AMac OS X on x86-Based Macintosh Computers
We discussed details of several x86-related features of Mac OS X in earlier chapters. In this appendix, we will briefly highlight the key differences between the x86-based and PowerPC-based versions of Mac OS X. It must be noted that despite the differences, most of the operating system is independent of the processor architecture.
A.1 Hardware Differences
Besides the difference in processors, x86-based and PowerPC-based Macintosh computers have several other architectural differences. Programs such as ioreg, hwprefs,[1] sysctl, hostinfo, machine, and system_profiler can be used to glean hardware-related information under Mac OS X. It is beyond the scope of this appendix to go into the details ...