December 2005
Intermediate to advanced
400 pages
11h 33m
English
Content preview from Running Mac OS X TigerBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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The Operating System Boot Process
When Open Firmware boots Mac OS X, it does so through BootX
(located in /System/Library/CoreServices). It’s important to note that Open Firmware doesn’t know that it’s booting Mac OS X, nor does it have any concept of the filesystem that contains BootX. All it knows is that there is a program at a particular location on a drive that it can load and run. It is the job of BootX to boot the system from there.
The first thing BootX does is display the “boot” image on screen. This is the monochrome gray-on-gray screen with the Apple logo and spinner on it that you see after your computer chimes. It then loads the kernel from the disk and the essential kernel-level device drivers (such as those for accessing disk drives) necessary to get things running. Once loaded, the kernel’s initialization procedure is called.
The kernel loads device drivers for all the devices connected to the computer and then finds the boot drive. It may seem a bit odd that the kernel has to find the drive that it was loaded from, but remember that it was loaded from the drive and then started. The kernel determines the drive it was loaded from by consulting Open Firmware. Once the kernel finds the boot drive, it mounts the drive at the Unix filesystem root (/), starts its internal process server, which allows processes to communicate with each other, and then starts the launchd
daemon, which takes over for the BSD /sbin/init program previously used by earlier versions of Mac ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.